Attracting potential leads to business has become accessible to everyone

Lead generation is one of the most important business goals. Having a good strategy in this area helps attract users who are more likely to convert into customers. However, generating quality leads is not an easy task. 28.2% of marketers in a survey conducted by GetApp indicated that this is one of the biggest challenges they face when setting up Google advertising campaigns. How to do it correctly, why advertising in Google Ads does not bring leads and How to set it up? Let's figure it out together.

TOP 14 problems when working with Google Ads

To analyze why advertising does not bring leads, we will need Google statistics and indicators of your campaign in your Google Ads personal account. We have selected the TOP 14 problems that you may encounter, as well as ways to solve them.

• No or few search queries

If you see a status of "Low Searches" in the Keywords tab, then your campaign is likely targeting very specific, niche or specific keywords that are not used by many users. 

While infrequently used keyword phrases can mean higher quality traffic, this won't happen if they prevent your search ads from showing up at all. Once Google notices that you're targeting a keyword with very little or no traffic, it will temporarily disable it from your account. 

How to setup

Make sure your keywords do not have a Low Searches status by visiting the Keywords section and looking at the Status column. If this status appears, you can click the link to view more information about whether your ad is showing and what the problem is.

 If the problem is that a keyword isn't searched often because it's too niche, try using broader terms or a broader match type to cover more relevant searches.

• Insufficient bid

If your keyword bids are too low compared to your competitors, this could be another reason why your Google ads aren't generating enough leads. 

Your keyword bid may be too low to place an ad on the first page, but that doesn't necessarily mean your ads won't show up on later pages 

How to setup

Go to the Keywords section of your Google Ads account and use bid simulators to evaluate the impact of increasing your bids on various metrics: clicks, impressions, CTR, average cost per click, and so on.

Then increase your bids for that keyword to a value you're happy with in the simulator test to see if your impressions and conversions increase.

• Daily budget exceeded

Depending on how your budget is set up, your advertising dollars can quickly run out. For example, many advertisers set their ads to run quickly, in which case the campaign's daily budget may appear as "limited." 

Budget Restricted status means your ad may not be allowed to run. This depends on the CPC you set compared to your overall campaign budget. In the case where Google advertising - cost per click - exceeds the budget, the ad will not be displayed. This is because Google Ads tries to spread your budget throughout the day to improve efficiency. What this means is that your ads won't show up every time someone searches for your keywords.

How to setup

One way to solve this problem is to lower your bids and/or increase your daily budget so that your bid to budget ratio isn't too high.

You can also set your ad schedule to limit impressions and target times when ads are most interesting. However, this may lead to the following reason for the decrease in leads.

• Ad scheduling is too narrow

Your ad schedule determines what days and times you want your ads to run. Without setting a specific display schedule, by default, ads will be shown on all days of the week and at any time of day. If you have exactly these settings, this cannot lead to a decrease in leads. 

However, if you have set up your own ad schedule and are low on leads, this could mean the following: 

• Show time is too limited. If your ad schedule is set to only run for one hour per day, your target audience won't have much time to search. If there is no search activity within that hour, your ad won't even show.
• The timing of the show is poorly planned. If your ad is set to run on days or times when your target audience isn't searching, it won't have the opportunity to generate clicks.
• For example, if you sell software for scheduling company employees and set up an ad to run at night, the effectivenessyour campaign will likely suffer.

How to setup

Go to your campaign's Ad Schedule tab and make sure your ads aren't timed too narrowly or scheduled at inappropriate times.

Do some research to find out exactly when your audience is online and searching the most, and consider expanding your ad schedule to include prime hours or days.

• Your landing page is not relevant

Google ranks your ads based on their relevance to the user's target keyword and the relevance of the landing page after the click. If the website page or landing page the link leads to is not optimized and relevant to your target audience, it will not work and your ad ranking will suffer.

How to setup

Take a close look at each of the keywords you're targeting and think about the users who are searching for those keywords.

• What are their pain points?
• What questions might they have?
• What solutions are they looking for?

The answers to these questions should guide the content of your landing page, creating a match between your ad and the site the user lands on after clicking. Pay attention to how relevant your ad is to the search query, as well as how well your landing page performs in the context of your keywords.

For example, a person typing “buy a key” in the search gets to your site with standard sizes of wrenches, although he wanted to purchase a key for the game - the rest is clear. You may even have to eliminate keywords that are too broad to increase the number of target users. The greater the relationship between a search term and your landing page, the higher your ad rankings and leads will be. 

• Random bidding based on negative keywords

Adding negative keywords to campaigns is great for limiting unwanted traffic. But if you're not careful, preset negative keywords can override active ones and prevent your ad from reaching your target audience. 

For example, if you bid on the phrase match keyword "CRM Free Trial" and set "Free CRM" as a broad match negative keyword, then that negative keyword will take precedence over the active keyword and be removed from impressions altogether . Instead, you should set the exact match negative keyword “free CRM” to only advertise your software to users who want a free CRM trial. At the same time, you can hide your advertising from users who are looking for a completely free solution.

Incorrectly placed negative bid adjustments are another possible reason why Google Ads ads aren't generating leads. For example, negative bid adjustments can reduce bids within a given campaign so much that they negatively impact your ad ranking.

How to setup

In the first case, review the list of negative keywords in your campaign's Negative Keywords tab to ensure you haven't added any that will cancel out your other target keywords.

If negative bid adjustments are lowering your ad rankings, bid simulators can help.

• Your ad set is not focused enough

When a user's search query triggers one of your ad group's keywords and you participate in an auction, Google selects the exact ad you associated with that keyword.

The effectiveness of participation in an ad auction depends on how well the ad matches the user's request. The more relevant, the higher your rating. 

So if your Google ads aren't getting enough leads, it could be because they aren't running often because the keywords and ads aren't relevant enough to each other.

Create ad groups that contain closely related keywords that focus on one specific topic. If all the keywords in your ad group are closely related, your ad is more likely to be relevant to a user's query no matter which keyword is involved or which ad is selected. 

• There is no bidding for desktop or mobile devices

Device type bidding lets you choose which devices to display your ad on - desktop, mobile, or tablet - or set general bid increases or decreases for keywords based on device type. This is a method that is useful for overall campaign organization and optimizing ad spend across devices.

However, if device bids are not set correctly, your ads may not generate leads for one of two reasons:

Devices you choose to display ads on are subject to a 100% negative bid adjustment, preventing ads from appearing on that device.

Your other bid adjustments are too low.

How to setup

• How to optimize correctly

should you bid to get leads? Make sure your device bid adjustment is not set to -100%, or experiment with higher bids until your ad starts generating leads.

• Targeting too narrow

Audience building is great for reaching specific customer groups. How to run such advertising? Before it can be shown, your selected audience must reach a minimum number of at least 100 active users in the last 30 days for Google Display Network ads and at least 1,000 active users for Google Search Network ads. If you haven't had enough time to build an audience that meets these requirements, your ad won't even show.

To see if your audience is too limited to target, go to the Display Network tab in your ad group or click the Interests & Remarketing tab. 

How to setup 

Either wait until your audience list is large enough, or upload more prospect email addresses into Audience Manager yourself to meet the requirements. 

• Incorrect geotargeting

Geotargeting is set at the campaign level, allowing you to choose which geographic regions you do or do not want your ads to appear in. However, the following geotargeting issues are prevalent among advertisers when measuring ad leads. 

• Geotargeting is too narrow.

Google allows advertisers to target regions within a country or zip code. However, as with keyword targeting, ad scheduling, and bid adjustments, if your settings are too narrow, there's a chance that they won't work for any search queries.

• The location is not relevant.

You may think you understand where your ads should appear. However, targeting can be done in places where your target audience is not represented, and Google does not perform well.

• Locations excluded.

You may have accidentally set your locations to Excluded.

• Bid adjustments for target locations are too low.

If your location bid adjustment is set to -100%, your Google ad won't work because it won't show in that region. Additionally, if your bid adjustment is too small for your keywords to rank high enough, your ads won't show up there either.

How to setup 

To see where your ads may or may not appear, go to the Settings tab in your campaign and then the Locations tab below it. Depending on which of the above problems you are dealing with, you will have to do the following. 

Expand your targeting to include a larger radius around a specific location, or check the proximity of cities or regions.

Do more research on your target audience to determine where they are located. Start with a broad search and narrow down to more specific locations after collecting data.

Make sure the locations you want your ads to appear in are set to "Added" rather than "Excluded."

Make sure your target locations don't have bid adjustments set to -100%, and experiment with adjusting your bids higher to improve your ad rank.

• The quality score is not high enough

Although Quality Score is not used during the ad auction to determine ranking, it indicates the expected performance of an ad during the auction. So, if you see "Rarely showing due to low Quality Score" status next to your keywords, your ads are probably just not getting enough impressions to generate leads.

How to setup

A low quality score indicates one or more problems:

• low expected CTR;
• poor quality or relevance of advertising;
• low quality or relevance of the post-click landing page.

See how your keywords, ads, and landing page relate to each other. Think about what optimizations to make and how to do them to improve relevance and user experience so that more people see your ads. 

• CTR is too low

Google strives to provide its users with a positive experience whenever possible, including the ads it displays. If your ad isn't clicked on often, it's a signal that the content isn't relevant to users, and your CTR will plummet and Google will likely stop showing your ads.

So, the higher the CTR for a given ad or keyword, the higher the ad auction performance, and vice versa. 

How to setup 

Give your ad a better chance of consistently being shown to your potential customers by writing attention-grabbing copy that forces them to click on a link.

• Use a limited time offer in your ad headline to grab users' attention 

To write compelling ad copy, be sure to consider the keyword your ad is targeting, the users searching for that keyword, and their specific pain points. Your goal is to meet their unique needs based on their current stage of the buying journey. 

• Small ad sizes

Each site on the Google Display Network differs in what placement sizes are available to serve ads. One may have space for a banner, another for 200x200 and 250x250 formats, and so on. If you only have one ad of one size loaded into a campaign, you're severely limited in where your ads can appear. 

How to setup 

Create an ad with multiple size options to maximize your exposure—and make sure those sizes are supported by the Google Display Network. A complete list of supported formats can be found in the official guide.

• The audience is too narrow

Google Ads has a huge number of targeting options that you can take advantage of - placements, keywords, demographics, and so on. Often advertisers will select several options from each type based on what they know about their target audience. However, if you use this approach, chances are you've created an audience that is so narrow that there isn't a single user who fits each of these parameters. This is especially true if you are using multiple targeting methods simultaneously. 

How to setup 

If you use "Targeting" rather than "Surveillance" as your audience choice, you are effectively blocking all other delivery channels and only serving ads to users who meet all the criteria. Check your ad campaign targeting settings. "Surveillance" would be the best option in this scenario because it allows you to set bid adjustments for each targeting method, but doesn't necessarily have to meet all the criteria. Rather, the ad will be displayed if at least one of the targeting criteria is met.