- You have limited budgets – search ads can eat up an enormous amount of budget easily if you’re not careful.
- Your brand, service, or product is new – if your brand or product is something which people aren’t widely aware of yet, they won’t be searching.
- Too much competition – CPCs (cost-per-click) varies massively from one industry to another. Competition can drive up costs to the point that you aren’t able to affordably generate enough traffic to justify paying for the ads.
- No tracking set up – you need to be able to ensure people are taking actions on your site which improve your bottom line, otherwise what’s the point? Are you using Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics? You should be.
- No specific goals – ecommerce sites need sales. Lead generation sites need leads. What’s your goal? What’s the best way to achieve it?
- You haven’t done any keyword research – is there traffic for the keywords you want to use? How much traffic? What does it cost?
- Another advertising channel makes more sense – social media, video, or display (website) ads may make more sense if:
- You need to build brand awareness
- Your target audience is easily reached on particular social networks or websites
- Your brand/product/service isn’t commonly searched for
- Your website and SEO hasn’t been polished up – paid search engine marketing is effective when done right, and even more effective when paired with a fully optimized website. The more presence you have on the search engine results page (SERP), the better. And if your site isn’t user-friendly or optimized for conversion rates (CRO), you’ll be missing out on reaching its full potential.
- You’ll ‘learn as you go’ while running your ad campaign and business – [see point #1 above] If you’re swimming in investors and have more money than you know how to handle, go for it. But if you’re in that situation you’re probably going to be hiring someone anyway. Bottom line: don’t waste your money on learning expensive lessons. These systems are complex and can take years to master. We’re happy to teach you [link to education offer] but we strongly advise against jumping in headfirst yourself.
- You aren’t willing to let the data tell the story – there will be times when you feel like a certain headline, keyword, or audience is a sure bet, but it just doesn’t pan out. If the data’s telling you that your ads are duds, listen to it. If the data’s telling you that your keywords are wrong, listen to it. Sometimes gut feelings work out, but sometimes they don’t.