So you built the campaigns out and set them live… but next morning, the traffic is barely there and your advertising campaign looks like empty Times Square?
There’s hope! Here are some of the things you can do to troubleshoot:
1. Check for Technical Challenges
Before you start scrambling dramatic changes, it is a good idea to check for technical challenges, since they are the most common reasons for low traffic.
A few things I suggest checking on:
- disapproved ads
- dead/incorrect URLs (especially if you are using dynamic parameters)
- billing issues (incorrect/expired credit card)
2. Revisit Keywords
Low traffic is often an indicator of a poorly constructed keyword list. Depending on how you created the initial keyword list, it may be beneficial to use a couple of additional keyword tools for a keyword expansion.
A few additional things to check on:
- keyword match types (I like starting with all three match type if the budget allows)
- keyword bids (if you bid low initially, many of your keywords may have gone inactive because their bids are lower than first page bid minimums)
- negative keywords (sometimes you may need to revisit the negatives because it may be too limiting or may contain a good keyword that made it to the negatives list in error)
- keyword disapprovals (certain kinds of keywords may require additional comments to be approved; this is common for pharmacy-related terms and gambling keywords)
- keyword-level URLs (if you used keyword-level URLs, check that they are working)
- keyword quality score (sometimes new accounts with no history get hit by low quality scores; check your quality scores and if they are low (anything below 3), consider making changes to improve the QS)
- keyword position (sometimes if you bid low initially, your ads show in very low positions (anything in position 8+ shows on the second page of SERPs; it is a good idea to bid up, at least initially)
3. Targeting & Settings
Depending on your initial setup and strategy, you may need to tweak your targeting and settings to get more traffic. For example, if you are a local business targeting everyone within the 10 mile radius, you may consider increasing that to 20 or 30 miles.
Here’s what I suggest looking at:
- Search vs Search Partners (sometimes when you start off with Google.com only, the traffic may be low, so I’d try expanding into Search Partners; there’s no guarantee that it would do much but still worth trying)
- Geotargeting (anything that’s under 50 miles in radius is extremely inaccurate and such targeting can result in low volume; I’d recommend opening it up to at least the city level; or, if budget permits, the metro area)
Note: this is not applicable to certain businesses (for example, pizza delivery)
- Languages (if you keyword list is in a language other than English, make sure the additional language is selected)
- Devices (if you chose to opt out on many of them, maybe you should reconsider; I prefer to look at web analytics data to make a decision about mobile and iPad visitors)
- Bidding (if you chose anything other than manual bidding, you may reconsider since starting up requires close attention and monitoring; setting it on auto-pilot from the beginning may easily result in low traffic)
- Start/End Date (may seem funny, but check to make sure that all of your campaigns are active and not scheduled to launch in the future; also a good idea to check for end dates – I’ve stepped on it a few times when I was starting up in paid search)
4. Consider broad match.
While I am not always a fan of adding broad match to fix low traffic, in certain cases it may be a great solution. If you have enough budget, I would choose one ad group to start with and see what happens to your traffic volume once broad match is active.
Last but not least, I also like to use web analytics data (if available) to grow traffic. I always look at:
- organic traffic volume and keywords
- branded traffic volume
- referral traffic (gives you ideas if you are advertising on the content network)
- overall traffic counts (it may be a niche industry and be low volume naturally)
- visitor geo-profiling (great for deciding what to target)
I also like looking at how competitor traffic volume compares (Compete.com is good for that) and using Google Insights for Search to:
- compare traffic volume on your branded terms vs your competitors (you may end up buying their branded terms if there’s enough volume)
- look for break-through new queries to expand your keyword list and negatives
Last but not least, you can also check out the Opportunities tab for traffic expanding keyword ideas.
