I am so sick of Google Adwords

Can you please let us know what type of products you are selling and keywords list?

What is your CTR? Anotherwords for the impressions are people clicking on your ad! The more clicks you get on your headline in regards to your impressions the more targeted your keywords are and the less you will spend on CPC. Also are your keywords to broad so to speak? Are you testing with "exact" match? Whats your landing page like? There are many things to consider and its all about improving the numbers. Stick with it and the sales will follow. Don't be afraid to spend 3 or 4 times your payout offer just to get some data to begin working the numbers.

I want to know about your selling product type.

I also think the targeted market could be the problem. Target a different market and let's share the results you get.

Fix your keyword strategy and try targeting intend based keywords

simple but efficient way to get your first sale,

Do analyse of your competitor, make some similar post & follow the same targeted audience.

Go through in depth research. I ensure you will find the accurate solution.

I can help you in this. Actually there is a process to remarket any product and also may be you are not targeting a proper audience that you want. and you have mention that there is page with 404 but google showing impression. It depend you , If you out that page as your Landing URL. Then Adword follow that only and show 404 page to your targeted audience.

Hi, OP,


Look up Perry Marshal's Guide to Adwords.


He has some programs but also a book (on amazon.com).


It should help you a lot.


Often, people click on the first 1 or 2 of anything that come up when they search for something. They don't look, they assume the 1st positions are being served to them because Google knows what they're looking for. However, that's not always the case.


For instance,


if you set up keywords like this:
wedding dresses
but you only have mermaid wedding dresses,


every time someone looking for ballroom wedding dresses sees your ad, they click (a mermaid wedding dress is close enough to what they're looking for) but then, they see you only have mermaid wedding dresses so they do not buy.


Then there are people who're not looking to buy, just to learn or to pass time or... But if you have not set up your keywords properly (no negative keywords), your ad will show up and they will click but not buy.

Okay mate ...spending/losing 200+ euros on google ads is enough to get any man in his feelings as you really sound upset! But allow me clarify things out for you!


I was stuck in the same quagmire as you but my terrible experience was 5 years ago hopefully at the end of this my short post, you'll find reasons to navigate away from the Google Display Network you're using!


Now from my experience, don't know about anybody's.... the best performing google ad formats are as follows:



1.) Call Only Ads
2.) Search Ads
3.) Shopping Ads
4.) Lastly Banner ads which is the one you deployed...


Now don't know why you chose google display banners to sell your products - i'll like to see your i'm sure wise reason!



But you need to know that banner advertising efficiency is on the worst plummet!


Here are some facts - Average Click Thru Rate for banners are about 0.06% -the this means your 232 euros spent isn't enough to see some serious conversion! I spent $1,500 5 years ago and had my butt handed to me!


Another - as many as 60% of all clicks on banner ads are accidental! Yikes.


Worst is: 90% of all clicks are from bots! So you insinuating click fraud? You betcha it is!


Now i didn't come up with all these facts - here's the link go see even more why you should dump google display ads and start using - i recommend google shopping ads if you have 20-100 products (i'm guessing you're doing ecommerce in europe).


link: marketinginsidergroup[dot]com/content-marketing/banners-99-problems/


You might want to replace the [dot] in the link, not sure if i can place link here!


So anyways you need to do both search ads and shopping ads - still very potent and powerful! Let us know how it goes, happy to help!

I would move on from it Michael. If it feels bad, it does not resonate with you. Give your attention and energy to something that feels good, fun and generous, to enjoy the ride and to see greater success buddy.

The target market could be the only reason that you are facing such an issue.

Hi Michael,

I wonder why my experience is so different from yours?

I have been generating millions of dollars of revenue using Google Ads (formerly AdWords) every year for many years. That's a pretty sharp contrast from your own experience, so let me try to parse this down into useful segments for you absorb.

You asked "Is it all click fraud?"

No, it is definitely not all "click fraud", however you are targeting the one network within the Google Ads platform that gets the most invalid clicks. If you have not gone to the extra effort of excluding most Mobile App categories then a substantial amount of your traffic is likely invalid, or at the very least unintentional ad clicks.

The Mobile app segment is very problematic and you can avoid those issues by excluding mobile app categories that are not extremely relevant to your niche, or better yet, simply excluding them all and only use carefully selected Managed Placements for Mobile apps.

Websites are less problematic than Mobile Apps, however you still need to frequently monitor Placement Reports and add Placement Exclusions for poor performing websites and Managed Placements for top performing websites.

The most obvious difference, between you and I, is overall experience, I have been at this digital advertising for 19 years, and even longer in marketing. So I may have learned a few things that you have not had the opportunity to learn given your limite experience with Google Ads. Herein lies the challenge you face.

It is highly likely that you are competing with advertisers that have far more experience, knowledge, and skill than you have garnered up to this point. This could easily account for your lack of sales after spending a mere 232€.

It is likely that your competitors have already performed numerous rounds of testing and optimizations of ad messages, campaign strategies and landing page optimizations. With an Ad spend of only 232€ stretched over multiple campaigns it is highly unlikely that you have completed a single round of optimizations.

You need to be realistic, you are using an ad platform that places you into a competitive auction going up against some of the most sophisticated marketers on the planet. Only the best of the best are going to win the bulk of the sales. That shouldn't discourage you because can compete and win, it just isn't likely to happen right out of the gate, you've got some learning to do!


You might want to consider running Search campaigns, or Shopping campaigns, in addition to, or instead of Display campaigns. While it is possible to run successful Display campaigns for direct response advertising, it requires a highly focused targeting strategy.

Generally speaking, the Display Networks is a great place for Top-of-funnel advertising campaigns (branding awareness and interest), and for Remarketing campaigns.

You should check to make sure you have a standard Google Ads account and you are not using "Smart Campaigns" (formerly known as AdWords Express). The Smart Campaign feature is for people that want to run ads but are not interested in managing their campaigns, so campaigns just runs on auto-pilot and will never have a chance of competing successfully against well managed campaigns. The Smart campaigns do not give you many options for managing your campaign,

Google Ads offers a rich set of targeting options which are applied at the Ad Group level. The are 3 main categories of targeting options that you can use:

• Audience
• Demographics
• Placements

There are multiple methods of targeting, and excluding, people based on Interests, Habits, Intent, Interactions with your website, Gender, Age, Parental status and Household income. In addition, you can further narrow your targeting based on Keywords and Topics.

You can find Ad Group Targeting Options under your Ad Group "Settings" tab.

Using a Maximum Conversion bidding strategy may not be the best option for you. It requires that you have AdWords conversion tracking implemented and it requires a 30 day history of daily conversions before it will kick in and actively optimize your bidding. Also, it isn't optimizing for ROI, or ROAS, it is generally considered a poor bidding strategy because it primarily attempts to spend your entire budget each day as the priority rather than making a profit. Try manual bidding to start and then switch to Target CPA, or Target ROAS bidding strategy after you have sufficient conversion data.

Google Ads was designed to be a self-help advertising platform. While Google has recently made efforts to be more like Facebook where everything is a black box, that only makes it simpler to get started, it doesn't lead to good performance.

Campaigns need to be actively managed, "set and forget" is not a realistic option.

You are using the top tier digital advertising platform and competing against marketers with very advanced skill levels. You are like a small fish in a big ocean, you are likely to get eaten by sharks before figure out how to swim. Think of this platform as something that will take you many months to master. Look at your first 6 months or so as an educational experience. the money you lose can payoff big as an investment in your education.

If you are unwilling to learn, or simply don't have the time or patience, consider hiring an ad agency to setup and manage your campaigns. That will allow you to hit the ground running. However, think bigger, you will likely need a couple thousand Euro to get things setup and optimized well enough that you are reliable generating profits from your ad campaigns.

HTH,

Don Burk

I am just passing by to see how you are fairing on. Did you implement the changes we suggested here?If yes have you been able to sell some item on adword?

I got to agree with the OP, google ad words is an abysmal experience.

1. The help pages are outdated and in no way match the current interface.
2. I found trying to load "URL placement" on the "search & display" networks extremely frustrating .
3. The URL placement never worked and any kind of diagnostics is non-existent.
4. I tried search keywords with a certain gender excluded from ad group.......the first signup I got was from the gender I specifically excluded.
5. The cost of clicks is so high now I fail to see how anyone can make $$ from it.

Hey Michael,

I suggest you pause your adwords campaigns.

With ebay you do not have any control over your site and so you are limited as what you can do.

If you want to sell your product you need your own funnel setup for it or have it on a shopify site or similar.

You can keep your ebay listings but I suggest you optimize those listings for organic traffic from ebay itself and for the search engines.

Once you have your own site with your products you then can actually optimize for google adwords or any other network by using their conversion pixels to optimize your ad performance. ( you can't even do this with the way you have it setup right now)

With your own site you will actually be building up a list of customers that you can potentially sell more products to down the road and that does not include what you can do on your site with upsells or bundled products.

adwords is dead .. lot of competiton and we need to pay high cost to top the first page..


better to concentrate on organic traffic with good quality SEO ..


hire an SEO specialist rather than depending on ad networks..

I conjointly assume the targeted market can be the matter. Target a special market and let's share the results you get.

Yeah it is true that adwords has lost almost all it's reputation of delivering good traffic, and it might be just because of the new methods of pushing ads over TV and media devices which are annoying the users more than a regular popup or popunder.

i don;nt know why its happening with you.. i am using google ads for my prouct last one year,and it was great experience.
keywods selection, and image banner selection is important point in success of adword.

Where are you sending traffic to? Is it to your website? If you select maximize conversions, are you actually implementing conversion tracking? Why are you not doing text ads, which is obviously higher quality and more targeted? Are you direct linking to Ebay?