Recognize Ineffectiveness and Consider Stopping: when to change?

[Qeno]

Hey,
for the last two weeks, I was trying to get pilots to visit my website with Google Ads. Today, I think that it didn’t work and that my hypothesis that it could is wrong. What I have achieved in this time:

• one conversion, that was a mistake ≙ 0 conversions
• 271 Clicks, 12.7k Impressions and a CTR of 3% overall
• ~160€ spend
• ~22h worked

Why do I now think that it didn’t work and I should try something else?
There are a couple of reasons. To start with the obvious ones: 1 conversion, that was a mistake and 160€ spend that returned (only) many learnings. Then I still find it very hard to believe that I can attract a career type with Google Ads, because I wouldn’t google my career type + getting fit to get fit. I knew that at the beginning, but still wanted to try it because I also wanted to learn how Google Ads work (and it was a lot of fun too). Finally, I don’t know how to further improve my campaigns except to give it time.

For you to better understand, what I have done (in more or less this order):

• read a lot of Andy’s posts
• use of audiences
• exact and phrase match keywords
• added negative keywords
• improved ad quality
• use of Google Display Network
• use of broader keywords
• increased budget
• tried competition keywords and keywords a pilot would more likely search
• improved IS
• improved search lost IS
• use of sitelinks, callouts, call and location extensions
• tried to improve quality score and landing page performance
• improved search exact match IS
• improved my copywriting to increase my CTR
• improved ad relevance

At the end all of these stats improved but weren’t good either.

So, what do I want to do now? I don’t really know. This is one of the reasons why I'm writing this. What would you do? I don’t want to “waste” any more money. From the beginning, it was intended to learn how to use Google Ads and get a few conversions. I think I achieved the learning part by most of it, but I am also aware of the dunning Krueger effect. I try to not be volume the reason why I stop, but at the moment I don’t see a reason why I should keep going with Google Ads. My next hypothesis would be to try out Facebook Ads because they have more personal information about their users and I also see as a next possibility to learn something important.
I will keep Google Ads running for a few days to see if something happens, but I decreased the budget. I also want to try manual bidding. That I spend so much in total was a mistake I made.

What do you think?
Can you evaluate if it makes sense to change direction?
What can I do better?
What should I improve?


Thank you very much for reading all this! It means very much to me!


Qeno

 

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[BellaPippin]

271 Clicks, 12.7k Impressions and a CTR of 3% overall

Someone correct me if I’m wrong but this isn’t bad, is it? You set up shop and 271 people decided to check out your store. Do you have more analytics on what happened after they went inside? What does the ad lead to? What’s your offer? Fitness for pilots? Is there a chance that your content can use some work?

 

[BizyDad]

I second what @BellaPippin is saying. Do you have product to market to message fit?

This might help MARKETING - The 3 M's of Marketing - Help For Beginners

 

[Qeno]

Someone correct me if I’m wrong but this isn’t bad, is it? You set up shop and 271 people decided to check out your store. Do you have more analytics on what happened after they went inside? What does the ad lead to? What’s your offer? Fitness for pilots? Is there a chance that your content can use some work?

I second what @BellaPippin is saying. Do you have product to market to message fit?

This might help MARKETING - The 3 M's of Marketing - Help For Beginners

Thank you to both of you!

Unfortunately, I don't have more precise information about what they are doing on my page because of the cookie law in my country. I thought it is bad because I read somewhere that a CTR of 30% should be the baseline, and so I was only working towards that. In addition to that, I think the source of some of my clicks isn't that good. For example: I tried using broader Keywords (just like Fitness etc.) which have generated ~100 Clicks.
The ad leads to my landing page, where they should enter some information about them in a contact form. There is definitely a chance that my page needs some work because I was only trying to increase my CTR/IS/Clicks.

Thanks for the link. I'll reread it! Done it! I think my biggest takeaway is this:

But what if you have the product, a strong selling proposition, and you know who needs it? Then it's just a matter of figuring out what the right medium to deliver your messages. Are your people even on YouTube or Google? We can make some assumptions, like tick tockers tend to be younger and Facebookers tend to be older. But would word of mouth or TV advertising be better? Sometimes you test several mediums until you find the right ones for you.

I may need to improve my selling proposition by a bit, but figuring out the right medium to use might be the next action I should take

 

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