The Reason Why Paid Ads Fail for New Businesses (And How to Prevent It)

Original Post by Jackie Petre | Updated by Amber Blevins

Paid ads aren’t always as blissfully easy as marketers make them out to be. We’re the first to say paid ads are a great route for your marketing strategy. They allow you to quickly get to the top of search results, which simultaneously exposes your brand name and increases clicks to your site. Sounds simple, right?

Then why is it that so many small businesses are unsuccessful with pay-per-click advertising?

Many small businesses choose to run a paid ad campaign when they want to promote a new product, service or special they’re running. Their thinking is that it will help them quickly spread the word and get lots of clicks in a short amount of time. So, they call up their digital marketing team and have them create a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign that highlights this new product.

Then they sit back and wait for the clicks and customers to roll in. They wait. And wait. And wait.

Much to the small business owner’s dismay, there are few clicks on the PPC ads. But why?

In order to show up in those top Google ad spots, your company must meet a few criteria:

1. Be willing to pay top dollar for the keywords you are targeting
   
2. Get enough traffic to prove to Google that you deserve to be in that top spot

PPC ads work best when there is already brand recognition. Searchers are often skeptical of clicking on an ad for a company whose name they are unfamiliar with. And if your page doesn’t get enough clicks, Google doesn’t see a reason you deserve to be in that top spot, and the search engine charges you more per click until you prove you can pull in traffic. Therefore, new or small companies often find it challenging to get page clicks, and Google ends up charging more for high-ranking ad spots.

This ultimately leads to the dreaded PPC failure.

However, there are ways to keep your PPC campaign from failing before you even start your campaign.

There are two real solutions to preventing the failure of your PPC campaign, and both involve planning ahead of time.

1. Grow your brand awareness before investing in paid ads
   
2. Advertise to an audience that already knows you
   

The first solution can be done in a variety of ways. Before you even think about running paid ad campaigns, invest in creating content for your company. This includes:

• Writing blogs
  
• Building a social media following and posting content regularly
  
• Creating search engine optimized (SEO) content
  
• Starting an e-newsletter
  
• Sponsoring posts on other blogs, social media, etc. (note—this is different than paid ads because you’re tying your brand to a company or person who has already established credibility)
  

Organic content like this will have a huge impact on not only paid advertising efforts, but also your credibility with consumers. If they see you work hard to have an abundance of useful information, they’ll be more likely to turn into a lead once they become familiar with your brand.

The second method is to target your ads to an audience who is already familiar with you. Many brands have more success getting past customers to come back than winning over an entirely new audience. So, how do you do this?

Both Google and Facebook have ways to remarket your ads , allowing you to customize your ad audience. These give you the ability to advertise to people whose email addresses you’ve collected through your business—such as past customers or those who have expressed interest—or to people who already like or follow you on social media. This guarantees that the people who see your ads will already be familiar with your brand.

Doing this increases your engagement, click-through rates and conversions, which then drives down cost-per-click while reaching a wider audience.

Before you invest in a paid ad campaign, do some preliminary work. Jumping into PPC ads before having brand recognition is one of the biggest reasons paid ads fail for small businesses. By prematurely growing organic content and advertising to an existing audience, you’ll find more success in your next paid ad campaign.