Your Google Ad Campaign Started off Great Now It Struggles to Convert
Dec 7, 2023
Your Google Ad Campaign started off great! You were getting a lot of conversions and everything was great, but then out of nowhere you start struggling to see conversions and you start to see your cost per conversion skyrocket.
"What the hell!?"
This can be quite frustrating to say the least, but there's usually a reason your ads have stopped converting assuming you haven't made any changes to your website or landing page.
You can try a/b testing a new bid strategy and this can help sometimes but ultimately you need to look at your conversion data across multiple dimensions to spot exactly where your wasting your ad spend.
First is obviously your keywords and search terms report. Sort each by cost for the lifetime of the campaign and filter out any that have converted. You'll also want to take note on your campaign's average cost per conversion for the entire lifetime of the campaign. Are there any keywords or search terms that have resulted in a high cost with no conversions? If so, consider pausing them.
Next, we're going to look at our Audience/Demographics; namely the Age, Gender and Household Income Demographics. Again sort by Cost and filter out any dimensions that have converted. Are their any dimensions driving up cost with no conversions? Consider adding a negative bid adjustment or excluding it entirely.
Moving along, we're going to look at locations. What's that you just are targeting one location? Then you want to make sure you set it up in a granular fashion at this time. For example, if you're targeting the USA, you want to list out each state. This allows you, you guessed it, sort by Cost and see which states are driving up cost but aren't converting. You can then add a negative bid adjustment or exclude the state all together.
Next let's look at your ad schedule, you should have this set up in a granular fashion as well so we can spot the times of the day and days of the week that are just driving up ad cost without converting.
Okay, almost done here, we have Devices next. It's only 3 so it's easy. It's just Computers, Tablets and Mobile. Are any of these Devices just driving cost up and not converting? Add that negative bid adjustment or consider excluding it by adding a -100% bid adjustment.
Last but not least, let's look at Ads. You should test out 2-3 ads per ad group at any given time. Make sure you have your ads set to rotate indefinitely in the campaign's settings. You don't want Google Ads algorithm choosing which ad to display. You're going to determine that overtime by just looking to see which ad is performing the best. Pause the ones that have proven to just drive up cost without any conversions to show.
Just by making these adjustments and reviewing the conversion data across all of these dimensions, you can reign in your Google Ad campaign and get it converting again.