There is good news about advertising placement in the digital space and there is bad news (there is even some in between news.) The good news is that it is cost effective even for a small business. The bad news is it can be challenging to get it right. The in between news, well that’s what we want to talk about today.

One of the huge positives about digital advertising compared with traditional advertising is that you are not just shooting in the dark. You can start a campaign and then almost instantly see how it is doing. This is a great thing, especially for small businesses who are limited in their marketing spend. There are also a LOT of moving parts to “get right” in order to have a successful campaign. The moving parts can make or break your campaign and the in between news is that you have FULL control over these moving parts.

If you have the time and knowledge you can spend your days away tweaking your Google Ads to get them just right. You can find the perfect combinations that will generate leads which turn into conversions to keep your website humming along and giving you a great return on your investment (ROI.) Of course, time is limited, so today we’re going to focus on the three most important things to check if your Google Ads are not performing or if they are underperforming.

1. Keywords: These are the lifeblood of your campaign and they are relatively easy to understand as you start to put your ads together. Generally speaking you want to find the right keywords that people use to find your product/service that will also encourage that user to click on your ad and convert to a customer. The challenge can be in finding the right keywords. You can adjust your keywords throughout your campaign based on performance and try to improve the performance of your ads. We don’t recommend doing this every day, but certainly once a month would be healthy.
2. Placements: Where your ads are being displayed is another critical component that is relatively easy to understand and can change regularly. You can have Google do this for you and the ad platform is generally pretty adept at finding the right placements for your ads, but if your ads are not performing you may want to switch over to manually selecting placements if you have a high level of confidence that they will convert.
3. Ad copy: A good ad can generate a strong click thru rate. In most cases, a click thru rate between 1%-2% is considered average and anything over that is considered a win. If you’re achieving anything under 1% you will want to tweak your ad copy to help generate more clicks. Clicks aren’t sales, but they are the first step that your customers will take to show you that they are interested in what you’re selling.

There is no silver bullet when you are building out your Google Ads campaigns or when you are tweaking them to improve them, but you can continually adjust them until you get the right amount of clicks and conversions to see the ROI that you need to call it a success.

Keep in mind that getting your Google Ads right takes time and can require a lot of trial and error. If your budget is limited, start small and tweak from there.