When Google Ads Will Never Work: 4 Signs You Should Walk Away (From a Google Ads Expert)

Sometimes Google Ads will never work, not because of poor management, but because the conditions simply don't support it. 

In this episode of the Google Ads Unleashed Podcast, host Jeremy delivers an honest assessment of the four structural reasons an ad account is destined to underperform regardless of how well it's run. 

Learn why Google is fundamentally a demand capture and physical availability channel, why it should almost never be your first marketing channel, and what to fix before spending another penny on paid search. If your account has never quite worked and you can't figure out why, this episode will give you the honest answer your Google Ads expert might not have told you.

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

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Transcript

The reality is although I run Google ads on a daily basis for for loads of businesses, Google Ads isn't for everyone. And there's a significant portion of you listening who have come to this podcast in the hopes of finding answers. And the reality reality is that your ad accounts will never work. It's not because of poor account management or anything that you've done. It's simply because of conditions that are outside of the realm of what you can change. And this episode talks about that as well because I have a policy of honesty and will always say what works, what doesn't work. And this is what this episode is about. Welcome back to Google Ads Unleashed. Hope everyone is doing fabulously this Monday. I believe it is already July when I've recorded this. It's been a a few weeks in advance because our producer has gotten married. So, massive congratulations to her. I just want to throw that out. Um, so and because she will be editing this and hearing this. Um, and yeah, but But despite of this very jolly start, um this is going to be a bit more of a somber episode because sometimes it's quite disappointing to learn that something simply doesn't work. Doesn't matter how hard you try. And the first thing that is an indicator of when it's okay to walk away from this channel is that there's simply no search demand. So Google is fundamentally a demand capture channel. Okay? It works by connecting businesses with people who already search for what they are selling. Okay? If there's no meaningful search volume for this product because it's generally novel or too niche or um described in terms that nobody actually searches for, then there is no demand to capture. No amount of budget or optimization creates intent that doesn't exist. Okay? So absent of demand is usually already an indicator that you should not be starting with Google. Often times you have also the case that you may have a problem that solves an issue, right? But people don't know they have that issue or they don't know that that pro product solves the problem that they have. Okay. So a very good example of this for instance many many moons ago I had a client who sold supplements for dog that help them with their joints. Okay? So, people were searching for stuff such as, you know, my dog is limping or my dog takes ages to get up and so on. How can I help him, etc. So, they knew they had the problem. The dog was aching, but they didn't know that there was a product that could potentially help the dog. Okay? So, there the difficulty here is already really high. I've talked about this many times. I call thisformational search terms versus transactional search terms. So, Transactional would be buy dog food, dog bone supplement or something like that. Transactional would or anformational would be my dog is limping. What do I do or something? Okay. And the issue is you usually convert this withformational pages, sales pages or or advvertorials. I've already talked about that. But starting with advertorials is really tricky and really highlevel stuff that I would only recommend further down the line. So if you are thinking about starting Google and your first sort of challenge would be to master advertorials, I would look elsewhere first for meta ads, for whatever. And quite frankly, if you're at the start, I would never start with Google anyway. Okay? So, regardless of search volume, regardless of what kind of people search for your stuff and how they search for your stuff to find your product or your service, I would never ever start start with Google unless there's a very good reason for it. And the reason for that is I find it's much easier to get a product market fit established if you use a push channel. Okay, push channels are much better doing so and that's why I would start with that. Then the second thing that um I would look into and why your uh Google ads don't work and potentially could not be fixed is that your offer isn't competitive enough. Um, this is related to an issue that I'm going to talk about a little bit later, but if a business is selling products are available from, for instance, well-known retailers or Amazon or whatever that offer lower price, a faster shipping, better return policies, Google will surface this comparison instantly. A user searches, sees multiple options, and will always click the competitor. tor because they may be cheaper, they have better conditions. Um, and often times you may pay for impressions and clicks here and getting nothing in return because Google rewards competitive offers. The best price, the best offer, the best shipping speed, the most trust signals, the best review, all of these affect whether click converts. Okay. If the offer is structurally uncompetitive and can't be changed, the channel will always keep underperforming. We've recently had this with a client who came to us who sold um office chairs and the office chair space is insanely crowded and we just could not fathom a way how we could um tie a good offer together that was better than the competitors. The competitors were more advanced, had more social proof, had faster shipping, better return policies, everything was better. So there was nothing we could do really. So in that regard, the job of a Google Ads expert very much becomes to try and change that offer. But sometimes that's not prop doable due to the next issue and that is your margins aren't competitive enough. Okay? Or the margins that you have simply don't support it. And this is a very common structural issue why Google ads fail. Okay? If a product let's say just carries a 10% margin uh and the category of uh CPC of that product is a realistic I don't know CPA pay of £30, let's say. The maths are the math math, right? And that's something that I say very often. Often times you have search demand, good click-through rate, CPCs are acceptable, conversion rates good, and you still are not profitable. So, the math doesn't work regardless of how good and how well the account is run. Google is essentially a cost perclick channel. It's called uh PPC marketing, pay-per-click uh marketing, right? You pay to compete in an auction. And that cost has to be absorbed into the margin before any profit can be made. And businesses with lower margins or heavily commoditized products or price points that are below roughly I'd say £30 20 in competitive categories oftenly really really struggle in this position. Um so which is which goes back to the push channel thing. You're less comparable um with push channels. You are more comparable Google, right? Um I'm trying to think of uh the concept right now. I'm going to have to Google this for a second. Um basically marketing has two uh purposes. All right. Um to first of all, uh create physical availability. Um which is simply the fact um one second I'm just going to There we go. Mental physic physical availability that is from Uh where is it from this may need I can't can't remember which uh it's a very good book that uh this is from but either way the author who came up with this principle has a has basically um built a framework or describes a framework what the job of marketing is and the first job of marketing is to be building in physical availability. So for instance uh just being available is a great form of marketing right so if your product is stocked in uh stores and widely available it's more easy to buy coke is such a principle right so coke is everywhere which is why it sells well right At the same time, there's probably supermarkets around your uh you know, around the corner from you where you purchase regularly. Just because a I don't know 7-Eleven is around the corner from you, it doesn't mean you're a big 7-Eleven fan. It's just the fact that it's there creates that physical availability and that's why you shop there, right? On the other hand, uh the job of marketing is to build awesome mental availability. So, if I were to ask you um what is the uh but name and luxury watch your straight away the answer would be Rolex right and this is usually the job of like YouTube ads meta ads and so on to build that mental availability that when people think of a certain product that yours comes to mind and all also is the first one to be recognized when they even search for you non-brand on Google or branded on Google okay and Google's job is to build that physical availability and physical availability uh competes on completely different um sort of principles than the mental availability part. Right? With mental availability, you're trying to instill beliefs. Uh he's trying to overcome uh certain uh how should I say certain hesitations that someone has. You're trying to communicate your values etc. With physical availability, you compete on price. And if your margins simply don't support that, then you are going to be toast. And then Google ads is not for you. Okay. Something that's probably the most easy to fix though is that um and this is probably my last point is uh your website. So it doesn't matter how good of a product you have, how great your account is set up, how good search terms and the right audience you capture. If your website doesn't convert, then you are sending traffic to a website, let's say with a 0.3 conversion rate, and it's just like filling a leaky bucket. No amount of additional water E budget fixes that underlying problem. So if the landing page is slow, if the trust signals are weak, if the product doesn't um actually um sort of, you know, uh con if the product page doesn't convince you, if the checkout is frictionheavy, if the product photography is bad, Google ads will amplify those problems and not mask them. And the uncomfortable truth is that some businesses need to fix the site before they should be running any paid search. Okay. Um a benchmark that's really well worth share in a well optimized ecom store should be converting at about 2 to 3% above uh or above for all paid traffic. Uh any anything below that it depends of course on price point and other factors is a signal that the problem is in the ads and that something needs to be done there. So there it is. Uh step away from Google if you tried everything and if any of this applies, no search volume or only transactional searches. If it's the first channel you're trying, don't do that as as the first channel. If your website's crap, fix that. If your offers crap, fix that. If your margins don't support it, well, often times unfixable. Some of these are fixable, some of them are not. You have to decide. Let me know which ones you think are um easy ones to fix. And if you need a hand at analyzing this, just send me a message, Jeremy Digital. Marketing, Jeremy on Google Ads on LinkedIn. You can also book a meeting with me, Jeremy, and uh um on uh the website youngdigital. Marketing. Just head there, go to my Calendarly, and pick an appointment. I'd love to chat to you. Until then, I'll see you in the next episode.