Your ads are running, clicks are adding up, but new customers aren't calling? Many business owners go through this and often conclude that online advertising doesn't work in their industry. The truth is usually different: the advertising works, but money drains out of the budget because of a few settings that look harmless at first glance. Let's go through the five most common mistakes and show you how to fix them.
If you're new to PPC, read what PPC advertising is and how it works first.
1. Missing negative keywords
When you set up a campaign, you tell the system which searches your ad should appear for. It's just as important to tell it which searches it should not appear for.
If you offer plumbing services and enter the keyword "plumber", without negative keywords your ad can also show up for searches like:
- plumber salary
- plumber course
- how to become a plumber
People searching for these phrases don't need your services. When they click your ad, you pay for a visitor who won't order anything from you.
The fix: Add negative keywords as soon as you create the campaign, for example free, job, tutorial, course, second-hand or forum, and after launch regularly check what people actually searched for. Watch out for the opposite extreme, though: a negative keyword that's too general can also block searches you want. More on that in Google Ads Campaign Not Spending Budget.
2. Location targeting that's too broad
Do you run a hair salon in Olomouc or a car repair shop in Kolín? Then it makes no sense for your ad to show to people across the whole country. Otherwise your budget gets clicked away by people from the other end of the Czech Republic who will never come to you.
The fix: Select only the cities, regions or radius where you actually operate. In Google Ads, also check the location options: by default, ads are also shown to people who are merely interested in your location, even if they're not in it. For local services, you usually only want people who are actually located there.
3. Ads running 24 hours a day, 7 days a week
If you only handle enquiries during working hours, for example from 8 am to 5 pm, set your ad schedule to match. An ad shown at 3 am might attract a click, but if the customer can't call you right away, they often forget about you by morning, and you've paid for that click for nothing.
The fix: Use an ad schedule and show your ads only on the days and at the hours when you're ready to serve customers. The exception is online stores and forms that accept orders around the clock.
4. No conversion tracking
Running ads without conversion tracking is like driving with your eyes closed. You know you're moving and burning fuel, but you have no idea where you're heading. Without tracking, you can't tell:
- which keywords bring you paying customers,
- which ones just eat up your budget.
The fix: Connect your campaigns to goal tracking on your website, for example form submissions, clicks on your phone number or completed orders. You'll find a step-by-step walkthrough in the GA4 setup guide. If you do have tracking but can't see conversions from your ads, read Why GA4 Isn't Showing Conversions from Google Ads.
5. All your ads lead to the homepage
A user searches for "custom wedding cake", clicks your ad and lands on the bakery's homepage, where they see sandwiches, pastries, contact details and the company history. Instead of searching the menu, they leave the site within a few seconds.
The fix: Create a separate ad group for each group of products or services and point it to the matching subpage.
How can MARLY help you with all of this?
Getting negative keywords, locations, the ad schedule, tracking and landing pages right takes time and experience. MARLY helps you with it:
- Audit: It goes through your website and your answers and recommends where and for which market to advertise.
- Campaign draft: It suggests negative keywords and makes sure they don't block your own keywords. It pre-fills locations based on the markets from the audit and, for each ad group, picks the landing page that best matches its keywords.
- An overview in one place: You don't have to learn the complex interfaces of the advertising systems. You can edit the ad schedule, locations and negative keywords of your Google Ads and Sklik campaigns from one clear environment. For Google Ads, you can also see what people actually searched for and exclude an unsuitable term with one click. We're preparing a Google Analytics 4 integration that will show whether your tracking is set up.
How much money to put into advertising so that it can be evaluated at all is covered in How to Set a PPC Budget. What MARLY can do and what we're working on is summed up in the article What Is MARLY and What Will It Do.