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It’s frustrating when you’re running your AdWords campaign and everything seems like it’s going well, but your conversions are nothing but a flat line of 0s. I mean you have awesome statistics, CTR, clicks impressions, everything looks great, and so you ask yourself, why aren’t my ads converting?

It has happened to me before and to tell you the truth, it’s a real headache.

Before you decide to shut down your AdWords and throw in the towel, you might want to check out these surprising reasons that might be hurting your conversion rates.

Are Your Landing Pages Directing to the Correct Service/Product?

If you have a friendly website with several landing pages that you can use, make sure you use them to your advantage. Let’s say I am a customer looking for stainless steel necklaces and I click on an ad that takes me to the home page. It will probably take me a couple more minutes to navigate the website and find what I am looking for.

This will result in customer dissatisfaction and a high bounce rate. It would have been more effective to create a landing page specific to what the ad is promoting. In this case, a landing page listing all the ‘stainless steel necklaces’ would have done the trick.

You already know that customers like to compare prices/ products/ benefits. I do it myself whenever I’m looking for a product, I tend to open several tabs and start comparing prices, colors and functionality.

Perhaps, you have a better product than your competitors, but if it is directing to the wrong landing page, nobody’s ever going to know. In other words, wrong ad/landing page match is an important reason why your conversion rate is so low and you’re not seeing any results.

So, here 5 basic pointer to identify problem areas in your AdWords performance and increase conversions.

1. Have an Awesome Landing Page

Now, it doesn’t mean that if you are leading your customers to the right landing page they will convert into whatever you want them to do.

Hasn’t it happened to you that you go to a website and you get overwhelmed with so MUCH information that you just get bored of reading and close the tab? Ain’t Nobody Got Time for That.

This might be happening in your website.

Make sure that your landing page is relevant to your ad; this will consequently increase your Quality Score. The Quality Score is an estimate of how relevant your ad, keywords and landing pages are to a person seeing your ad.  Be brief and concise about your product or the service that you want to provide to the public.

A description, images or videos of the product or service will do.

2. Avoid a Scammy-Looking Website

I’m the type of person who tends to be a little bit hesitant to purchase when visiting a new site. If you are accredited by the Better Business Bureau or by another company, you might want to put it in a visible spot on your website, because that gives the business more credibility. Accreditation badges are and testimonials are an effective way to build trust with your visitors and hence avoid looking like a scam.

Nowadays, online fraud is of common occurrence. Fraudulent behavior includes putting up website for one day to rob online visitors.

An about us page always helps to give background on the company’s history and goals. This information gives searches the confidence to entrust their money and expect a transparent transaction. For example, if you are a plastic surgeon, it is very important to put where you got your accreditation from and if you are member of the board and so forth.

Little things like accreditation badges, company’s team members’ section, and blog section help build credibility and in return that customer will call or contact you in anyway possible.

Easy Paying Method – Check Out        

Also, make sure all the information is clear to the customer to convert and process the payment. Often times it happens the customer is ready to buy that killer dress or those discounted shoes at the moment, but he or she can’t find the check out page or the process to is to complicated. So, you are left with abandoned shopping carts.

Make it easy for the customer to buy your product.

3. Did Your Webmaster Make Changes On Your Website And Didn’t Tell You?

You don’t have an idea of how many times owners don’t know that their ads have been running without redirecting to any landing page.

It’s very common to update your website and change the name of the domains to organize and structure the website. However, always make sure that you have a redirect somewhere to link them up. If you don’t, your customers will go to a big 404 error page and guess what? They’ll leave and it will cost you a lot of money.

Additionally, your bounce rate will jump off the roof!

4. Your Ads Might Have the Wrong Call to Action

Is your ad only accruing costs but no conversions? Try changing the call to action. A call to action is a word or phrase that tries to persuade a person to take an immediate action. For example, Call Now, Contact Us Today, Sign Up, Get Started Today are some examples of calls to action.

This call to action is an essential part of the ad, as well as a best practice if you want your customer to know what to do next after they click.

Do You Have The Wrong Message in Your Ads?

Sometimes, you might have the correct call to action but you’re transmitting the wrong message. It happens all the time. You really want to be specific about your service or product or else you’ll bring irrelevant traffic.

For example, if you’re advertising ‘John Deere toy trucks’, you really want to emphasize on all of your ads that you are selling toys and not the real trucks.

The message you want to get across is important, you definitely do not want to be misleading nor confusing.

Quick Tips: It helps when you read your ad aloud. Also, if you have a keyword that you’re not sure whether to include in your campaign, simply do a search on Google and see if it makes sense to use it and if people in your industry are using it as well.

Sometimes, your keywords might be the problem and not the ads.

5. Your Website Isn’t Mobile Optimized

It is surprising to see a lot of big shot websites without mobile optimized pages. E-commerce and Local Businesses need to have their websites mobile optimized!

More and more users get online through their mobile devices whether it is to call a taxi or buy a sundress while they’re at work.  It is important to address how websites look on a small screen.

The other day, one of my clients asked me why she needed to have a mobile optimized website if her website already looked great on a mobile device. I started by naming all of the benefits and after listening to a silent background I told her to look up her competitors to see if they were doing it. And yes, they were. There’s always room for improvement, having a mobile optimized website is a no-brainer.

Your website needs to be accessible, friendly and efficient to use. Here are some basic characteristics of user friendly websites: images are quick to load, scrolling left or right is not needed, and zooming in and out to read the text is not required.

When customers go to a landing page that is not mobile optimized, they will go somewhere else to convert. A poor experience doesn’t convert customers.

Embrace These Tips And Stay Ahead of The Competition

I hope these 5 basic pointers help you identify problem areas in your website that are also affecting your AdWords performance. They say the devil is the details. A little tweak here and there can make a huge difference for your potential customers.

You can have a killer ad, but if your landing page or website does not match your ad, your potential customer will leave your site with a negative impression. High bounce rate and low conversions are just the beginning of a declining AdWords campaign.

I challenge you to implement at least one of the guidelines mentioned above and you will see an increase in your conversions.