They don’t have conversion tracking set up properly

For ecommerce, this usually means they either don’t have sales conversion tracking set up at all or they have “add to cart” or product page views as a Primary Conversion along with purchases. You only want purchases to be your Primary Conversion with ecommerce with the rare exception.

For lead gen campaigns this means not tracking offline sales conversions or marketing qualified leads. Also, not tracking all ways a lead can come in via their website.

They don’t have a large enough budget

These days I recommend setting your daily budget to be a minimum of 20x what the average CPC is for your target keywords. So if the average CPC for your target keywords, in Google Ads Keyword Planner, shows to be around $5 that means you should have a daily budget of at least $100 if not more.

This is so you can utilize bid strategies like Max Conversions,, Max Conversion Value, Target CPA and Target ROAS. These more advanced bid strategies need more conversion data to be effective which means you need a healthy budget. If you have a low budget you’ll end up getting low click and conversion volume which will mostly restrict you to using more inferior bid strategies like max clicks & manual CPC. These can still get you decent results but typically not as good as the above mentioned bid strategies which require a steady stream of conversion data.

They don’t run ads long enough; wrong expectations

This usually goes along with a low budget. The business has a low budget and runs ads for say 1-2 months. They may have seen some leads come in but it wasn’t profitable so they stop their campaign.

With Google Ads, the businesses that can afford to commit to a longer time horizon are the ones who are going to be most successful. Most Google Ad campaigns need 1-3 months before they become profitable. With Google Ads the longer you run the campaign, the more conversion data you accrue, the more efficient & profitable the campaign becomes as you’re able to see which keywords, locations, demographics, audience segments, etc are generating the best results.
When you run your ads for a short time and stop, you never give it a chance to succeed.

They freak out if the campaign hits a slump; being too reactionary

A lot of businesses that end up having a winning profitable campaign, at some point will hit a slump in performance. Ahhh!!! What to do!?

You’ll usually see them posting in online forums asking what they can do to get everything back on track! “Help!!! Ahhh!!”

The truth is, fluctuation in results is normal with Google Ads. When you see a dip in performance, it’s important to take a deep breath, take a step back and take a look at the bigger picture.

Look at all time stats (or larger data sets like the past year or two). Is the campaign still profitable when looking at all time stats? If it is, then a small dip doesn’t warrant any special action.

Just stay the course, keep running ads and making gentle adjustments based on past performance.

In fact, making a bunch of rash decisions and hasty adjustments can end up making the campaign perform even worse or go back into learning mode.

If the campaign is no longer profitable when looking at all time stats then you should start to worry and revisit what it is you’re offering and why it might not be attracting as many leads/customers now.

Obsessing over the landing page and A/B testing.

This one is more for lead gen campaigns than it is ecommerce. Also, it refers to landing page design, not the offer. It should go without saying that the offer should already have product-market fit.

I’ve seen businesses that think optimizing a Google Ad campaign to increase conversions & ROAS is all about creating & A/B testing countless different landing page variations with slight differences.

Unless you’re going to test huge changes (or a different offer completely) AND commit to a A/B test until it reaches statistical significance then there is no point in conducting an A/B test.

If you see a change that could be made to the landing page that would likely improve performance, just make the change, it doesn’t always warrant an A/B test.

Does your landing page design impact the results you’ll see from your Google Ad campaign? Yes. Is it the only factor? Not at all.

You just want a simple, clear, easy to read landing page that effectively communicates your value proposition and you want it to have simple, low commitment call-to-actions so people can inquire about your services. It should also load relatively fast.

You don’t want sales copy that is all "me, me, me". It's important to meet your audience where they're at, show you understand their painful situation, only then will they believe you have a proper solution for their painful situation. The business that understands their audience most wins.

That’s it! It’s really not rocket-science. Here are some more tips on how you can design a high-converting landing page.

Focusing on the wrong metrics

I just wrote a blog post about this recently, explaining why it’s important to choose which metric is going to be your KPI. There’s really only 4 metrics that you should be focusing on and using as your KPI; conversions, cost per conversion, return on ad spend (ROAS), conversion value (Total Sales Revenue).

Conversion rate, CPC, CTR, they’re all garbage to use as a KPI and anything that’s not a KPI is not worth looking at. Read the blog post for more on this.

They use the wrong campaign types

I’ve seen lead gen campaigns that try to use Pmax and it just doesn’t work. It leads to an insane amount of spam and bot leads. The same can be said for using display ads or video ads for lead gen campaigns. For lead gen, you’re better of sticking with search campaigns.

On the flipside, if you have an ecommerce business, Pmax usually will outperform search, display & video ad campaigns. It will usually outperform standard shopping ad campaigns too.

Also, the “smart campaigns” Google Ads tries to make you launch when first creating a Google Ads account should also never be used. Be sure to switch your account to “expert mode” and pause any smart campaign you were forced to launch.

As you can see, campaign is important. Choose wisely to avoid failure.

They use the wrong bid strategies

Bid strategies are also important. You will typically see better results with automated smart bid strategies like Max Conversions, Max Conv. Value, Target CPA and Target ROAS. These all need enough conversion data to work well however.

You can see good results with Max Clicks or Manual CPC bid strategies but it can be more work and they usually only really make sense for low-budget campaigns which you know I’m already not a fan of.

Wrong keywords & match types

Which keywords and match types you use impact performance greatly. If you’re looking to achieve the highest ROAS possible with your budget then you want to focus on high intent relevant keywords. Once you’ve maxed out your budget on these high intent keywords and you still have ad budget to spend, then you can try testing out low intent relevant keywords.

For match types, I’ll typically start off with broad match and then if a broad match keyword just shows to drive up cost with little to no conversions, I’ll switch the keyword to phrase match. Then if a phrase match keyword just shows to drive up cost with little to no conversions I’ll switch the keyword to exact match. Finally, if an exact match keyword shows to just drive up cost with little to no conversions I’ll pause the keyword.

There are a lot of ways people manage keywords and match types that may work for them, this is my system that has worked well for me. I think businesses get in trouble with this when they only use one match type. There’s a time and place for each match type.
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Bad product-market fit

‍Last but not least, the market just might not be very interested in your product or service for whatever reason; it could be price related or something else. Not every campaign is a success.