Why Your Google Ads Campaign Has Zero Conversions

It's frustrating to watch those Google Ads bills roll in while your campaigns have zero conversions! Whether you're an experienced agency pro or a business owner managing your own account, this is one of the most common Google Ads challenges you'll experience. In episode 111 of the Inside Google Ads podcast, host Jyll Saskin Gales walks you through the exact process she uses with her Google Ads coaching clients to diagnose and solve conversion issues. In this real life example, Jyll figures out why a client's search campaign hadn't seen a single conversion in six weeks. Then, Jyll uncovers the truth behind a suspiciously high view rate in a YouTube campaign. This episode is all about understanding the "why" behind your Google Ads metrics, and learning how to distinguish between green flags and red flags in your account.

Key Topics Discussed:

• The three root causes of zero conversions, and the order in which you should audit and solve them
• How to identify if the Search Partner Network is inflating your metrics with low-quality traffic
• The danger of using click-focused bid strategies like Manual CPC
• Establishing benchmarks for YouTube View-Through Rates (VTR) across In-stream, In-feed, and Shorts.
• What your campaign demographics can reveal about performance fluctuations
  
  

This episode is adapted from a popular issue of Jyll's free bi-weekly Google Ads newsletter, The Insider. Read the original issue here: https://learn.jyll.ca/newsletters/the-insider/posts/google-ads-metric-traps ?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=episode111

You can get Inside Google Ads episode transcripts delivered to your inbox each week by signing up for free at https://free.jyll.ca/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=episode111
 
Google Ads Coaching
Need some expert help with your Google Ads strategy or optimizing your campaigns? Book a call with Jyll! Learn more at https://jyll.ca/pages/google-ads-coach?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=episode111

Inside Google Ads course
Join 400+ marketers like you who are mastering Google Ads with Jyll's Inside Google Ads membership course. You'll get exclusive access to JyllBot, and you can meet top industry experts at an exclusive live video call every single month. Learn more at https://learn.jyll.ca/iga?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=episode111

Read more about this topic on Jyll's Google Ads Blog
- "I'm getting impressions and clicks, but no conversions in Google Ads." https://learn.jyll.ca/blog/i-m-getting-impressions-and-clicks-but-no-conversions-in-google-ads?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=episode111
- Google Ads isn't recording my leads as conversions. Why? https://learn.jyll.ca/blog/google-ads-isn-t-recording-my-leads-as-conversions-why?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=episode111
- Should you use Maximize Conversions or Manual CPC bidding in Google Ads? https://learn.jyll.ca/blog/should-you-use-maximize-conversions-or-manual-cpc-bidding-in-google-ads?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=episode111

Follow Jyll on social media
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https://www.youtube.com/@the_google_pro
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https://www.threads.net/@the_google_pro

Transcript

You start a new Google Ads campaign and you're trying to be patient. One week, two weeks, no conversions. Three weeks, four weeks, no conversions. Five weeks, six weeks, no conversions. 

Okay, we've got a problem, but how do we fix it?

Today, I'm going to share a story from a real Google Ads coaching client of mine who had this exact problem. After six weeks with no conversions in a campaign for her healthcare-focused client, she booked a call with me and we got to the bottom of it together.

I'm your host, Jyll Saskin Gales. I spent six years working for big brands at Google, and now I work for you.

This is Inside Google Ads, Episode 111: No Conversions.

My client is the head of paid search at an agency, and I meet with her and her colleagues regularly. So this is an experienced Google Ads practitioner, but she ran into a roadblock, so we got on a call. 

I shared with her that when a campaign isn't converting, you have to determine the root cause of the issue. Usually, it's one of three things: your conversion tracking isn't working, you're bringing the wrong people to your website, or you're bringing the right people to your website, but then you're not able to convert them into customers.

That's usually the order I'll analyze things in. 

So first, we looked at the conversion tracking setup and determined that everything looked right. We were able to rule that out as the potential cause here. Though I will say, with most coaching clients I meet, that is at least one of the root causes.

Then we moved on to the second: are we bringing the wrong people to this website? To determine that, we looked straight at the search terms, and here's what we found.

At first glance on the Search Terms Report, things look great. The top 10 search terms by impressions were all highly relevant and the overall click-through rate was solid. But then I noticed something that seemed a little weird. One of the top search terms in this campaign had a 75% click-through rate. And if this was, you know, four impressions, three clicks, fine, things happen. But this was a search term with thousands of impressions. So there is simply no way that a non-brand search term in a competitive health industry is earning a 75% CTR on Google Search.

I immediately thought that Search Partners was the culprit. My client didn't think so because they never turned on Search Partners. But we turned on the segment by network with Search Partners, and there it was. Search Partners was not only active, it was eating up about half the campaign's budget. This explained everything, at least for the Search campaign.

You see, the agency's SOP, Standard Operating Procedure, was to use manual CPC bidding for new campaigns. Not what I typically like to do, but totally fine. I don't have a problem with it. However, by being on manual CPC bidding, which doesn't optimize for conversions (remember, it only tries to get clicks) and then opting into Search Partners - perhaps because a recommendation turned it on or it was just an accident - the campaign had become focused on getting the cheapest possible traffic. And of course, the cheapest possible traffic, the spammy kind that gets 75% click-through rates, often comes from the Search Partner network.

A lot of clicks, not a lot of quality. It was no surprise that these clicks weren't converting. We were bringing the wrong people to the website. So to fix it, my client immediately turned off Search Partners. Then I also suggested switching the bid strategy to Max Conversions rather than manual CPC. Even though the campaign did not have conversions yet, this will get the campaigns learning to focus on the right signals and the right placements on Google Search. Because we were pretty darn sure conversion tracking was set up correctly, we felt comfortable doing this.

But that wasn't the only problem here. That helped us fix the root cause problem of why a Search campaign had zero conversions after six weeks, but it wasn't the only thing we looked at in the call. You see, something sparked in my client's head after we fixed that issue. She asked me to look at a different client's account. 

In this account, they were running a bunch of YouTube campaigns and they just weren't sure if they were really doing anything or not, which, you know, is fair. We don't expect conversions from YouTube campaigns. But what can you look at to determine if it's actually doing something valuable for your business?

Once again, I started by looking at the top-line metrics with her and I got concerned again when I saw a metric that looked too good to be true: a 70% view-through rate on in-stream ads. 

Let me break that apart for you. View-through rate is views over impressions. It's like the video version of a click-through rate; of all the people who are served this video ad, how many choose to view it? Now, a view means a different thing for each of the YouTube placements: an in-feed view, an in-stream view, or a Shorts view. So you have to analyze them separately.

In-feed means the user is served a thumbnail and has to choose to go watch it. So I look for 1% to 2% view-through rate on in-feed. 

In-stream means the video is playing as a skippable ad before the video that the user was trying to watch. I usually look for about a 40% view-through rate for in-stream. 

Then Shorts is in the Shorts feed, which is super easy to scroll past if they want to. I generally look for about an 8% to 10% view-through rate in Shorts. 

So seeing a 70% view-through rate for in-stream either meant we had the perfect audience and the perfect creative and everything was going perfectly, or something was going wrong.

Together, we went through my YouTube checklist that I like to look at to understand, "Am I getting the right people to see my ads?" 

First, we checked the Placements Report to ensure we weren't showing ads on a ton of kids' content, because kids don't tend to skip ads. We confirmed that the top placements by impressions were all quality news channels. Good. 

Next, we looked at the audience targeting and confirmed that we were only targeting the specific custom segments and retargeting lists that my client wanted. Optimized targeting was not turned on, either intentionally or by accident.

Then we scrolled down to look at the demographics of the campaign. I like to check to make sure we're not showing huge pockets of unknown users, because that can suggest lower quality inventory or audiences. To be clear, I don't recommend excluding unknown from the get-go, but if you have a campaign where the 18 to 25 and 25 to 34 segments are super low and then "unknown" spikes, that's a warning sign that something unusual might be going on. That's where we actually found our answer. 

The largest age group viewing these ads wasn't "unknown." It was 65 plus. This red flag actually turned out to be a huge green flag because this video campaign was targeting retirees. We wanted it to be targeting people 65 plus! 

This is where it's important to take off your Google Ads Analyst hat and put on your human hat. If you think about it, it makes complete sense that an older audience would be more likely to watch YouTube ads rather than skipping them.

The 75% click-through rate in Search was a red flag. We dove into it and found that there was a problem and fixed it. The 70% view-through rate in YouTube was also a red flag. We dove into it and determined that actually things were working exactly as intended. This is why it's so important to understand the "why" behind your metrics. This, by the way, is what separates the good Google Ads practitioners from the great ones.

Here's what I want you to take away from this coaching call. 

1. First, establish benchmarks. 

Start building your own Google Ads encyclopedia of what a normal CPC, CTR, VTR, et cetera, looks like. I have my own benchmarks that I've built over the decade plus I've been doing Google Ads. They may be very different for you and your clients or you and your business. When a metric drastically deviates from your benchmark - it's either much higher or much lower - that doesn't mean something's definitely wrong. It just means it's time to dig in.

2. Next, make sure you look for the root cause.

It would have been really easy for us to just focus on the fact that there were no conversions and say, "Huh, tons of clicks, no conversions. We have a conversion rate problem, optimize the landing page." But you have to keep questioning your assumptions until you find the solution. 

My client genuinely didn't think Search Partners were turned on, but they were. That's a very honest mistake to make. It could have happened because auto-apply recommendations were turned on, because the client received an email and clicked a button to turn them on, or because during the campaign setup process, that button mysteriously got checked again even though she had unchecked it. Yes, this has happened to me. I see it happen to so many clients. So even if you think you know, "I'm only tracking that as a conversion, I'm definitely not on the display network," definitely double-check. Don't assume anything.

3. Last but not least, you always have to be a bit cautious around any kind of bid strategy that is not a conversion-focused bid strategy, because Google Ads is literal. 

It's like Amelia Bedelia. It will do exactly what you tell it to do. If your bid strategy is focused on clicks, like manual CPC or Max Clicks, it will do whatever it can to get a lot of clicks, even if they're low quality. If your bid strategy is focused on views, like in a Video View campaign, it will do whatever it can do to get a lot of views, even if they're low quality. 

Think of what you would do if your goal was to get the cheapest possible clicks. You would turn on Search Partners, right? Think about what you would do if your goal was to get the cheapest possible views. Yeah, optimized targeting, kids' content, sensitive content - all of that. 

Think about what's the lowest path of resistance that an algorithm could take. That might lead you pretty quickly to your root cause problem.

If you're ready to stop guessing and start fixing the real problems in your account, you can book a Google Ads coaching call with me at jyll.ca. That's J-Y-L-L dot C-A. 

This story was originally published in my bi-weekly free Google Ads newsletter, The Insider. So if you enjoyed this, you can sign up to get The Insider in your inbox every other Tuesday at the link in the episode description. 

I'm Jyll Saskin Gales, and I'll see you next time Inside Google Ads.