Pay-per-click advertising has a poor reputation among many small business owners, and not without reason. The most common experience is spending a few hundred pounds on Google Ads, not seeing any obvious return and concluding that it doesn’t work. In most of those cases, the problem wasn’t the advertising itself. It was the setup.
Done well, PPC is one of the most controllable and measurable ways to generate leads. You choose exactly who sees your ad, what query triggers it and how much you spend. When it’s working, you can see precisely where every enquiry came from. When it isn’t, you can usually identify why.
PPC buys you visibility at the moment someone searches for something relevant to your business. It puts your website in front of people who are actively looking. What it can’t do is fix a landing page that doesn’t answer what the visitor is looking for, or a weak offer, or a contact form that doesn’t work on mobile.
This is where many campaigns go wrong. The ad does its job and brings a motivated visitor to the website. Then the website fails to convert them. The budget was spent, no enquiry was generated and the conclusion drawn is that PPC doesn’t work. The actual problem was the page they landed on.
Sending paid traffic to your homepage is usually a mistake. Your homepage is designed to orient a visitor who knows nothing about your business. A visitor from a PPC ad has already told you what they’re looking for through their search query. They need a page that immediately confirms they’re in the right place and makes the next step obvious.
A dedicated landing page for each ad campaign, or at minimum a specific service page rather than the homepage, consistently outperforms a homepage for paid traffic. The page needs to answer the specific query, demonstrate why you’re the right choice and present a clear, easy call to action.
One of the most common reasons small business campaigns overspend without results is poor keyword match type settings. Broad match keywords, where Google decides which searches trigger your ad, can result in your ads appearing for queries with no relevance to your business at all. Without regular monitoring and negative keyword lists, a modest daily budget can be consumed by irrelevant clicks very quickly.
Phrase match and exact match keywords give you more control over which searches trigger your ads. They typically produce a smaller volume of clicks, but those clicks are from people more likely to be interested in earnest in what you offer.
A Google Ads campaign isn’t something you set up and leave. The searches people use change, competitor bids change and Google’s own systems adapt over time. A monthly review at minimum, covering search term reports, Quality Scores, bid adjustments and negative keywords, is what keeps a campaign performing rather than slowly draining budget.
Quality Score, Google’s measure of how relevant your ads and landing pages are to the queries they’re targeting, directly affects how much you pay per click. A high Quality Score means you can pay less than a competitor and still appear above them. Improving it is one of the more cost-effective things you can do in an active campaign.
If you’re running Google Ads that aren’t producing results, or you’re thinking about starting a campaign for the first time, we’d be happy to talk through what good management looks like for your specific situation. Get in touch with the b:web team in Plymouth and we can start from where you are.
