5 Reasons Your Google Ads Aren’t Converting (and How to Fix Them Fast)

Are you spending money, getting clicks, seeing carts fill up… yet sales stay flat? You’re not the only one. 

This is one of the biggest pain points I hear from new advertisers, training clients, and even experienced media buyers. So in today’s episode of Google Ads Unleashed, we’re breaking down the five most common reasons your Google Ads don’t convert, and exactly what to do about each one.

It’s Black Friday week, so if your sales aren’t climbing yet, this episode will help you diagnose what’s happening inside your account and what might be happening after the click too.

Get your free 30 minute strategy session with Jeremy here: https://www.younganddigital.marketing/

Scale your store with 1:1 coaching: https://www.younganddigital.marketing/1-2-1-coaching

Transcript

So you spend the money you get in some clicks. You seem that something's going on in your store. People are adding stuff to the cart. People are sort of checking out, but no one is buying, barely any sales. You're not alone. This is one of the most common pain points that I hear from a lot of sort of, especially training clients that we have. And today I want to break down the top five reasons why your Google ads aren't converting and what you can do about it. Welcome back to Google ads. Unleash guys. Hope everyone is doing fabulously this Monday. So it's Black Friday week. Hopefully your sales have picked up already. But if they haven't, today is about what can go wrong in your ad account, because I do quite a lot of teaching. So every every Monday, I deal with a lot of people who are new to Google ads, who have never really run many ads, of run very few ads. And usually the ones who have run a little bit, they come to us, and that's why they are in the training, because they say their Google ads are not working. It's not converting them spending. My competitors are spending and are on there, but it's just not working for me and what's going on, and whether you're a media buyer, might even know this yourself, that sometimes you're doing stuff for a client and it just doesn't seem to work. Or, of course, if your business owner yourself, you just simply can do whatever the hell you want, and it just doesn't seem to be moving the needle. So that's why I thought I'd break down sort of the most important things in this podcast. And we'll start with you're targeting the wrong stuff. So very often, when I actually go into a Google Ads account, I see that people are doing some really wild shit that simply causes their ads to show up for the wrong people, for the wrong and some of these are connected for the wrong people and for the wrong search terms. A lot of the points, the five points I'm going to mention, they're quite connected, but you're actually showing for traffic that's irrelevant. You're getting clicks for irrelevant, and that's why you are not getting people to purchase. So for example, couple of things that I see very often missing or no or wrong conversion tracking that already sends Google on to the wrong path. I'm going to expand a little bit further on conversion tracking, but that's one of the first things that can cause your ads to show up for the wrong search terms. The second thing I very often see is no use of first party data. It's quite difficult. If you're completely new store you want to have this feature. But I've talked a lot about customer lists in Google ads. Just go back to one of the other episodes to go for that. But very often, what I actually see is either mix of an odd bid strategy with a lot of settings that are on default in p max or shopping or search that are just wasted spend. You know, things such as, for instance, opted into asset optimization and p max without having check knowing what it does, or opt into the Google Display Network. Stuff like that. I very often see things such as broad match and automated bidding, or actually broad match and manual bidding, which is even worse, which just shows up for a ton of irrelevant clicks. And I also see quite poor understanding of match types, poor understanding of negative keywords, and just poor understanding of how you actually craft in a an infrastructure. That sets you up for the to target the right traffic. This also goes to the shopping feed, right? So no optimized titles, no optimized feed, and just, you know, putting everything into 1p max, and then trying to let it run. What happens then is that you just show in full random stuff that, of course, is never going to lead, first of all, to high quality clicks, and then secondly, to people who want to purchase something from you. So my tip here is to simply do the basics. Well, install get an expert to get conversion tracking installed. Get yourself audiences set up optimize your shopping feed. I have so many episodes about how to optimize your shopping feed. Listen to all of them and just set up your campaigns for success with a tight structure that starts with relatively tight match types if you use in search regard disregarding any irrelevant or poor placements and settings. You don't want a tight, negative keyword list that you prune in aggressively on a regular basis, so that you then have a control over what kind of search terms you actually start showing for. The same goes for shopping optimize if. Need don't have stupid settings on there. Try and split out brand or non brand. And also listen to the episode where I talk about bidding strategies, because selecting the correct one here also will determine what kind of stuff you show up to. And that's actually my point number two, wrong bidding strategy. So I've done an episode, especially at the beginning, what is actually going to happen when you don't have any conversion tracking, first party data and anything? You still have to optimize the feed and do the correct setup, but without conversions, is bit of a chicken and egg problem. You can't use smart bidding in in order to actually generate a consistent and stable flow of sales. So you have to start with maximize clicks or CPC, and you will have some ad wastage. And that is just naturally going to happen until you cross a certain threshold where you can set a T, ROAs or T, CPA. So there will be some ad wastage, but try to minimize that as much as possible with negative keywords. That is all that you can do, and you need to really make sure that you sort of step by step, put yourself there. But a lot of people, very prematurely, jump on to bidding strategies which just make the ads show for relevant stuff, because Google has no idea what it's doing, flapping its wings and flapping into every direction, showing the ads to whatever may or may not actually generate, you know, an impression and some money for Google. So make sure you're choosing the right bidding strategy. I have a very expensive guide on what to do when you're at the start. Listen to an episode there too. And I also have quite an expansive guide on when you should be switching to automated bid strategies, and what you can even do with bit strategies such as Max conversion value or max conversions that you can use to bridge the gap between being on manual CPC or on max clicks to then go over to target ROAs or T CPA. So super, super important. Also, of course, this links together with your with your clean data, with your conversion tracking, because without the correct conversion tracking, you can't actually choose the correct bid strategy, either.
And that brings me to the third point that the tracking doesn't work, or you're tracking the wrong stuff. So if you reward in Google for a page view and that you track that as a conversion, well, guess what? It's just going to go for search terms. I will generate the most clicks and the most page views possible, possibly very high volume search terms, which are more informational rather than transactional, right? Where people are in research motors, where they want to gain more information. But the algorithm, if you treat, for instance, just a page view, as a conversion, so tracking the wrong stuff, then, of course, it will just generate as many of that and waste your money, and no one is going to buy. It's the same with lack of purchases, right? If you if that doesn't work at all, then you will never be able to feed Google the data that says to Google, hey, this is success. We need more of that, right? So this is something that goes wrong all the time. So usually what I would do to double check whether tracking is broken is to try and click on a branded search right and to have the brand search show isolated in a small location where only I am at the moment and I can click the brand search and make a test purchase, if it shows the following day, everything is working as it should. If it's not showing you need to diagnose what the issue is. Is it the app that's causing an issue? Do you have it wrongly set up with GTM? What the fuck is going on? Right? That's really something that you need to get into. And I would highly, highly recommend that you get an expert if you are really weak in that area, because tracking is so important and cannot, under no circumstance, be wrong in your ad account, because it sends the algorithm the wrong way, and you will not be able to actually understand what is working and what is not working in your ad account. Reason number four that I see very often is that the page that you send in your traffic to is simply dog shit. Okay? It loads terrifically slowly that already causes people to bounce and sends the wrong signals to Google. It very often has zero follow zero principles of how a product page or landing page should be so no trust badges, no product strong product imagery, no reviews, poor CTAs, poor USPS, done a full episode on what a good landing page should look like and what a good product page should look like. So. And very often I see actually ad accounts, which, you know, or people come to me and they watch my training videos, and they've set everything up, and it's all working fine. And in fact, they've done everything correct, right? They've optimized their feed. They got their audiences set up, they got a conversion track, and they got all the campaigns, the yada yada yada, and still shows zero conversions. And then I look at the product page, and it's an absolute fucking disaster, right? I think what happens to a lot of people is because to them, the product is obvious that they're selling. It is so obvious to them that they think it's obvious to anyone else. It's almost like, imagine you're listening to this, and you speak English, you can't imagine not understanding English, if that makes sense. So it's really hard sometimes to have that sort of subject, that objectivity, to step away and to analyze and look at your thing and say it's really just not that good. And it's hard to admit as well, because it's like a personal defeat. I had this thing last week where a client was in a training call with me, and he sells some supplements for horses, which is really a cool product, but I said to him, Listen, everything here is going wrong already, right? Like, if you look at your product photos, you literally just have the photo of your, of your off your product, and it literally looks like a liter of diarrhea, right? It's in this brown fucking thing was sloshing around in there. Looks absolutely horrific. Then we looked at the competitors, where there was a happy horse on there, and nice, nice imagery, even just on the packaging. And it already started. Then the rest was shit as well. So literally, that is already where things are going wrong. My pro tip here is, if you have the right traffic, if you have good ads that are generating clicks, if you're doing all the other stuff, which I've just mentioned and you still don't have people buy in, is simply install Hotjar and ask people, put in an exit intense survey or survey on your page, and ask people the following question, what would stop you from purchasing today? And I guarantee you will get some fucking gold out of that, right? You will get answers in there or people saying the price is too high. I don't like the product image. I don't trust it. This information is missing, whatever they will tell you. People who fill this out, there's 100 other people thinking the same shit, right? Change your product page. It has to be really, really CRO optimized, and today there's no margin for errors anymore. Maybe six years ago, you got away with a bit of a shitty product page, but people like the product anyway, and that was the end of it, and it still work today. This just is not good enough. So a big part of our job nowadays is really to understand what happens after the click, and then to optimize that. Which takes me to my fifth point is that you have either a product that's simply not competitive, or you have a shit because new customer offer. What do I mean by that? So for instance, competitiveness by price is a simple thing that you can check. If you have a product that is twice the price than sort of the average 567, products that show and the first three to six search results for search terms that are important to you, then you are simply overpriced, and you're not even going to be showing for the right search terms, nor is anyone going to buy from you, even if you're let's say you even shown for the right search terms. Again, a few clicks, people will not buy from you if they can get the same or better product at a cheaper price elsewhere. And it's simple psychology, because Google, first of all, is a product comparison engine. Yeah, never forget that. So the cheaper product actually affords you more visibility and more reach and more clicks, but at the same time, people buy when the perceived value of what they are actually wanting is higher than actual price of the product. And the cheaper your product, the better, the more sales you will make. For instance, if you give all of your products away for free, I bet you you'd have the highest conversion rate you'd ever have in your entire life. Right? So price is a massive, massive factor, and people confuse this sometimes with new customer offer, which I'm going to get to. Price is one thing, and it's very important, and a good pricing policy, and then intelligently priced product is super, super important for your store success. And this is proven. This is just an online thing. It's even offline. You get this in Starbucks, for instance, right where they coax you into choosing certain sizes because it's a better perceived price. And pricing is just so so, so important. And then lastly, I want to wrap up with. With sort of the last idea in that, and that is your new customer offer. So when you actually get people onto your site, you need to convince people why they should become a customer with you. So of course, reducing your price and giving them a discount is one way of doing it, but there's many ways to skin a cat here, right? So you have to provide a reason why people should be purchasing with you, and give and become a customer of yours and give you the trust, you know, bonus forward and this new customer offer could look any, any sort of way, right? It could be that you just bundling up a couple of products and giving them off. Or you give a free gift with every offer. Or you make a buy three pay to sort of offer any, any kind of thing that encourages people to put the thing into the cart and to make the purchase. I when I look back at all of the businesses that I've bought something new. From so far, I have almost always bought because I thought the offer was good, right? Even think about it yourself, and I don't mean the last Ryanair flight that you booked, right? Because Ryanair is well priced and it's a highly trusted brand, right? So it's I sane Ryanair, because that's literally just what I booked half an hour ago.
But what I mean is, for instance, I am currently wearing a north face jacket. So okay, I trust the brand North Face, but I actually went into a north face store the other day, and they had not only a very good sale on but also, when you got to a certain amount of money, you actually got, like, a little sort of gift on the side that you that that you got as a new customer. Of course, I bought like two or three things in there, and they're very nice. I knew they were going to be nice because North Face. So maybe it's not the best example, but it is something that pushes you over the edge in order to try something and a good customer offer could be anything, right? It could be anything I even, let's say, for instance, like in summer, I went to I thought about that. I've been thinking about this for a long, long time, because it's one of the best salesman's salesman I've ever come across. I went to a food festival in Cardiff, and there was this gentleman, and he had, he sold sausages. He was a butcher, and his new customer offer was like a pick a mix bag of five different sausages, and you would like make a recommendation to you which ones you should try. And just the way he presented that as the that is the bait like here, try five and get this for free and and you can come back and have a and on your next one, which you really like, you can have this discount that was an amazing sales strategy to not only increase his average order value, but also to convince you to try The brand, to try him, and give him the trust, and that's what a lot of people simply go wrong with. Okay, so look at all these things and see if it works. If it it's not that Google ads just doesn't work. That's not a thing. Sometimes that is a thing, but very rarely it is. If your ads aren't converting, there's usually a reason, and it's usually always fixable. And if you want to find out how one to one coaching I've already mentioned, you can always hit me up for that to find why it's not working for you, and will help you to make it work within three months. We also have opened our doors for the new year to take on new clients, because we've just expanded our team by two more growth managers, which is super, super exciting and a big step for us. So just send me an email at Jeremy, at young and digital dot marketing, or you can find me also via our website, young and digital dot marketing, and can book a call with me. Or lastly, you can just send me a nice message with any question you may have to Jeremy young Google ads on LinkedIn. Thank you very much for listening, and thank you very much if you subscribed as well. And I'll see you in the next epiode.