My Google Ads Aren't Working

(light music)- My Google Ads aren't working. What do I do? Welcome to Legal Marketing 101, I'm Toby Rosen. Today we're tackling a common frustration that I hear from so many legal professionals. My Google Ads aren't working. We're gonna go through the various issues that can hinder the success of your Google Ads campaigns and I'm gonna provide you with some detailed solutions to overcome some of these top issues. I wanna start though by emphasizing that Google Ads can be a really powerful tool in your marketing arsenal, but it's not uncommon for businesses to face challenges that make them question Google Ads's effectiveness. So if you find yourself scratching your head, wondering why your Google Ads aren't delivering the results you expected, fear not. I'm gonna shed some light on some of these top issues and help equip you with the knowledge to conquer them. First up, disapproved ads or content limiting delivery. One issue that can really significantly just destroy the performance of your Google Ads campaigns is having disapproved ads or content like site links or other extensions that can actually restrict the delivery of your ads. Google Ads has some pretty strict policies and guidelines in place to maintain the integrity of their advertising ecosystem and provide a safe experience for their users, which is their primary goal. However, it's really not uncommon for businesses to unintentionally violate these guidelines, and this can lead to disapprovals or a status message that you may see that says limited ad delivery. It's also not uncommon in the legal space for Google and many other ad platforms for that matter to incorrectly flag ads as having some sort of inappropriate or restricted content in them. In that scenario, we have to go through a review and appeal process to get the ads approved, or we have to change them or delete them from the account entirely, which we often don't wanna do. Common guideline violations include misleading content, inappropriate or prohibited content, unsupported claims, issues with links, non-compliant ad formats, a bunch of sort of ticky tack stuff that tends to get ads pinged. Dealing with these disapproved ads or with content on Google ads can be a really frustrating process that almost always requires repeated contact attempts to get the issue rectified. When you encounter a disapproval, it's really important to understand the specific guidelines you violated, but sometimes Google can be a bit difficult about explaining what has actually happened. Google doesn't always provide detailed feedback and reasons for disapproval, so having an understanding of the guidelines that might relate to your content can help when making changes to the ads to make sure that you get approval on the first try. If you don't get in touch with Google or they keep sending you a form response, keep following up. It might take a while and it might take 10 emails, but usually they will get back to you. If they don't, like we said, we can edit or we can delete ads from the account and make changes so that we become compliant. Issue number two is low bids or having bidding settings that are restricting your traffic. Another really common issue that can significantly impact the performance of your Google Ads campaigns is having bids that are too low or having bidding settings that are incorrect or that restrict the flow of traffic to your ads. This can have a very direct negative impact on your campaign's visibility and overall performance, because you won't get the clicks that you need and you won't get the best quality clicks. Google Ads operates on an auction-based system where advertisers bid for ad placements. When your bids are set too low or if your bidding settings are misconfigured, it can restrict your ad's ability to compete effectively in the auction. As a result, your ads may not receive sufficient impressions or clicks, limiting your reach and conversions and ultimately the leads you receive. To tackle this, though, it's really crucial to optimize your bidding strategy and settings. And let's go through a couple of ways you can overcome these low bidding issues or bidding settings issues and unlock the full potential of your Google Ads campaigns. First, evaluate your bid amounts. Take a close look at your current bids and assess whether they align with your campaign goals and your budget. If you're bidding a dollar but you expect to pay up to a thousand dollars for a client, those numbers might not make sense. Low bids limit your ad's visibility and restrict its chances of winning the auction. You're bidding against other advertisers and trying to get to the top spot. Consider increasing your bid amount strategically to improve your ad's competitiveness. Number two is keyword research and bid adjustments. You need to conduct really thorough keyword research or have your pay-per-click manager for conduct keyword research to identify the keywords that are relevant to what you're selling and have significant search volume. By not only targeting stuff that's relevant, obviously that's better for conversion, but if you target keywords with higher search volume, you're gonna increase your chances of reaching a larger audience. On top of that, you can experiment with bid adjustments for different keywords. So you can allocate higher bids for keywords that are more likely to drive valuable traffic, more likely to create leads, while reducing bids for keywords that seem a little less relevant or that prove to perform lower. Number three is exploring bidding strategies. So not just adjusting and changing, but Google Ads offers various bidding strategies like manual bidding, automated bidding, and a few variations on that, and then submitting add-ons like enhance cost per click. Test different strategies to find the ones that not only perform best, but align with the clients you're trying to generate. there is a difference between on-the-page performance and real-world performance. Automated bidding, for example, uses machine learning to optimize your bids automatically based on a bunch of different factors that Google keeps track of, such as the likelihood of someone to convert. This kind of bidding can help you streamline your process, reduce the amount of time you're spending on Google Ads, and improve your overall campaign performance. Number four for keeping your bids in check, though, is monitor and refine. Bidding is not a one-time set-it-and-forget-it task. You have to continuously monitor your campaign's performance and adjust your bids accordingly. You have to keep a close eye on metrics like click-through rates, conversion rates, cost per conversion, all of these metrics. And you can identify areas where your performance can be improved and refine your bidding strategies to do that. On top of all of this though, it's worth noting that finding optimal bidding amounts and bidding settings can be and usually is a process of trial and error. It will take time and experimentation to strike the right balance between your bids and which keywords you can actually convert from. Don't be discouraged if you don't see immediate results. Stay persistent and keep refining your bidding strategy based on these data-driven insights. Number three though, of why your Google Ads aren't working. Insufficient keywords or low traffic keywords. In a similar theme to number two, Your choice of keywords plays a really pivotal role in the success of your Google Ads campaigns. If you don't have enough keywords or the keywords you've chosen are too low traffic, it will limit the visibility of your ads for users. When you're looking at your keywords in your Google Ads account, you might notice some of them are limited by low traffic or that even when you have a really high bid, the number of impressions or clicks you're receiving is still low. So let's fix that. First, like we did in step two, we have to conduct thorough keyword research. This is always gonna be a sort of a main tenant of what we're doing with Google Ads, but we need to identify keywords that are not only highly relevant to our legal services and to the services we're trying to sell, but have significant search volume. You wanna leverage research tools like Google's Keyword Planner or third-party tools like SE Ranking, SEMrush, or Ahrefs to uncover not only the keywords that you want to use, but related relevant keywords and other phrases for long tail keywords. I really like to use multiple tools together to get an even more in-depth list of high traffic keywords and long tail keywords that could be high converting. But remember to strike a balance between broad keywords that are targeting all of an industry and specific keywords so that you can not only capture a wider your audience but maintain relevance. And don't forget we'll go into it in future episodes but it's really important to work with different match and types to help hone in your targeting. We'll talk about that again in the future. Let's take a look at an example though to make things a little bit more concrete. Suppose you're a personal injury lawyer in Chicago. Instead of just targeting generic keywords like personal injury lawyer or lawyer in Chicago, let's take a look at more specific and long tail keywords like car accident lawyer in Chicago or slip and fall attorney near me. Of course, a lot of this stuff in personal injury, that's probably not the cheapest keywords in the world. But as I've talked about in previous episodes, the more niche of a subject that you're targeting, this almost always tends to lead to lower client acquisition costs, lower costs in advertising, and generally lower levels of competition overall. Moving on to number four. One of the biggest reasons people have trouble with Google Ads, and one of the highest input areas of Google ads is the ad copy and the landing page. So issue number four is that you have poor ad copy or a poor landing page experience. The quality and relevancy of your ad copy and landing page experience is directly impacting the success of your Google ads. Not just how people convert, but whether or not your ads do well. If your ad copy is lackluster or your landing page doesn't really live up to users' expectations, it will have Google doing your performance. There are a ton of issues I see regularly when it comes to law firm ad copy, but I'm assuming by now you've avoided the major pitfall of talking about yourself and the biggest issue I see is that law firms that have copy that fail to capture attention or communicate their value proposition. Weak ad copy almost always results in lower click-through rates and ultimately a less successful campaign. If the top of the funnel where we're generating clients is weak, the bottom isn't even going to matter. To deal with this, it's vital to craft compelling ad copy that grabs the viewer's attention and clearly conveys the unique benefits your law firm offers. You wanna use attention grabbing headlines, concise and persuasive language, and most importantly, a strong call to action to entice users to click on your ads. But let's shift our focus over the landing page experience. Even if your ad copy succeeds in driving clicks, and you can usually make this happen through testing, a poor landing page experience will still cause users to bounce quickly, resulting in wasted ad spend and missed opportunities. In general, you want to be able to engage a user visiting your landing page from a paid ad within 9 or 10 seconds, or the likelihood that they'll bounce, meaning that they'll leave directly from the page they entered your site on, the likelihood that they'll bounce just skyrockets. Now, as many others have, and I may at some point, I could fill a book with landing page ideas. But for this episode, let's just take a look at some of the key tenets of high-converting landing pages. Number one is relevancy and consistency. You have to ensure that your landing page aligns closely with the promise made in your ad. You need to keep the messaging consistent So users feel that they have landed on a page that fulfills their expectations. Provide relevant information and make it easy for users to find what they're looking for quickly. Number two is a clear value proposition and really a clear call to action. You need to clearly communicate the unique value of your law firm offers. Not just saying who you are and how you got to where you are, you can highlight your expertise and what the competitive advantage of working with your law firm is, but you wanna make it clear to users that choosing your firm over others is a good decision, not just because of the plaques on the wall. We'll come back to client story and landing pages more, but that's one of the key issues is clearly stating your value proposition. Number three is having engaging content. So not only having relevant and consistent and having your value proposition clear, but something that draws the user in. Use compelling and persuasive language like we've talked about, to keep these users engaged. Utilize a mix of text, visuals of other multimedia elements to convey the information you want to say and make your landing page much more visually appealing. Number four is mobile optimization. With the increasing use of mobile devices, basically everybody, it's basically unacceptable to not have a mobile-friendly landing page. You need to optimize your layout, your design, functionality and make sure it's fast enough to load on lots of different devices. There are now tons of services and companies that will help you with this. Number five, and this applies not just to the mobile, but to the desktop as well, is having a fast loading speed overall. Slow loading landing pages are a major turn off for users. You need to make sure your landing page is optimized to reduce your bounce rates, keep your users engaged, and make sure that things like images, code, all this stuff is compressed and minified, and even when possible, utilize caching to improve your load times. I know we're really just scratching the surface of how to make a great landing page, but if you keep those five key items in mind, you'll be on your way to building something great. To gauge the effectiveness of your landing pages and identify areas for improvement, you also want to monitor your performance score, like Google's quality score, and use tools like Google's PageSpeed Insights and GTmetrics to check how your page is performing. There's even third-party tools to help evaluate landing page performance like Hotjar, Crazy Egg, and Google Analytics. They provide insights into how users are behaving. Hotjar and Crazy Egg have heat maps to show what users are looking at and clicking on on pages. Using conversion tracking and all these different platforms can help you identify where users are either engaging as you want them to or dropping off and encountering obstacles in the flow of your website. That will help you optimize all of your marketing funnel. Now that we've covered some of the most common issues, though, that may make your Google ads seem like they're not working, remember, it's all about optimizing your campaigns to stay ahead of the game. By addressing disapproved ads quickly, refining your bidding strategy, conducting thorough keyword research, and constantly enhancing and refining your ad copy and your landing page experience, you'll be way ahead of the competition and on the way to unlocking the full potential of your Google Ads campaigns. If you have any questions or topics you'd like me to cover in future episodes, again, please don't hesitate to reach out, toby@rosanadvertising.com. That's it for Legal Marketing 101. Check out rosanadvertising.com for more. Thanks.[MUSIC]