The local market is filled up with entrepreneurs and people who have vision. In order for you to stand out you must portray a level of enthusiasm to show that you’re in the game. Today is all about the four key reasons local businesses fail when using Google AdWords. You’ve likely heard other business owners trashing Google AdWords as being expensive, complicated and ineffective. That’s actually a good thing because it means there’ll be less competition. AdWords get a bad reputation in many circles and while clicks are expensive for more people and the interface is complex most of the time when advertisers get bad results they only have themselves or those they hire to manage their campaigns to blame. There are 4 main reasons local businesses fail with Google AdWords.

No Landing Page or a Really Bad Landing Page:

The first page of visited to your site lands on after clicking on your Google ad is called the landing page.

A landing page is an essential part of your AdWords campaign and a good one can instantly double your leads from AdWords without sending a cent more on clicks not having a dedicated high converting landing page is a massive mistake based on experience I estimate the typical local business website converts somewhere at around 5% on the other hand a better design landing page can easily convert at 10 to 20% even if we assume it just converts on the low end you’d double the amount of leads you get for the same money spent so that means for every thousand dollars you spend instead of getting ten leads you’re now getting twenty. That difference could easily make or break your month or even your year.

Horrible Ads with low Click-Through Rates:

Most Google ads say basically the same thing and to be honest they’re not all that compelling in the way that they say it as with landing pages are high converting Google ad with a high click-through rate or CTR can also instantly double your leads and the best part is that Google rewards you for having high CTR so not only will doubling your CTR get you twice as many potential leads but you also end up paying a lot less per click that’s because Google has an algorithm known as quality score and quality score determines how much you pay for clicks in AdWords just because you bid the most free keywords doesn’t guarantee your ad will show up in the top position.

Google rewards relevancy and if you can show Google your ad is more relevant than your competitors and CTR is the number one factor used to determine relevancy you can end up ranking higher than your competitors, get paid less per click than they do.

No Conversion or Call Tracking:

We’ve seen that 60-70% of the leads for local businesses come in the form of a phone call furthermore phone call leads tend to be high quality leads because someone who is really a hot lead is most likely going to pick up the phone and call rather than just submit the information through a form on your website. If you’re not tracking call conversions then you’re missing out not only on the sixty to seventy percent of your leads but also your hottest leads not tracking call conversions also means you’re not going to be able to optimize your AdWords campaign well. You can throw a ton of money away on bad clicks if you’re not tracking calls and have the data that shows you which keywords and ads are making the phone ring and which ones are not.

Poor Campaign Structure:

With all the AdWords, books, articles and training courses available it’s somewhat surprisingly even have to mention this; however, I still see AdWords campaigns every week that are set up poorly many times by agencies that should know better and don’t even adhere to basic best practices. One example of poor campaign structure is a single campaign that runs on both search and display networks. Search and display are two utterly different beasts and they should never be lumped together in a single campaign. In fact, I urge you to avoid using the display network to advertise your local business until you develop strong Edward skills and seek additional training. Other examples include only having one ad group having too many keywords and going to broad with the keywords in your campaign. AdWords may not work all the time for every local business. There are some situations where due to high click costs, budget internal sales problem or other issues that even a well-structured AdWords campaign won’t generate a high enough return on investment however in my experience that’s the exception much more often than the rule.