The System won't spend my budget, What am I doing wrong?

[PamAllen68]

Hi All,
I am new here and a bit new to Adwords. I have set up a campaign for a client that sells Carpet Cleaning services. I have separate adgroups for each of his services and keywords seem to be all good with decent quality scores. However no matter what I tweak it won't give enough impressions to spend the budget. We are getting 1-3 clicks a week. My client is ready to quit Adwords. Can anyone give me any ideas to get our campaign moving? Is there some setting I can change or should I maybe raise the bids and budget way high? (I am sitting in position 1.5-3 currently for the impressions we are getting)

We usually get around 600-800 impressions a day. Budget is low at 50.00 a day but the client wanted to try out Adwords before spending a lot of money. We are spending maybe 20.00 a week though due to nothing happening so it doesn't seem to matter.

Thanks for any help you can give.
Pam

[aakk9999]

it won't give enough impressions to spend the budget

It is not impressions that spend the budget, it is clicks.

We usually get around 600-800 impressions a day.

We are getting 1-3 clicks a week.

If I got your numbers right, this is in the range of 4200 to 5600 impressions for 3 clicks, making CTR of about 0.5%. This is very low. Either your ad is not attractive enough to be clicked on or the keyword targeting is poor.

Carpet cleaning is fairly localised service. If your ads are coming up for searches of carpet cleaning in (for example) another city, and your ad has city/region in it where it operates, then for example you may get poor CTR.

So I would review the targeting and the wording of the ad.

[PamAllen68]

The targeting is very specific to the zip codes they work in. The ads have all been rewritten recently and it helped a bit. I thought the system would keep showing the ads until the budget was spent for the day. I thought about raising the budget to fool the system to make it show the ad more but I am afraid it will overspend.

For keyword targeting we just tried to include any word or phrase that people might use to find them. Then I removed anything that said it was a low quality score and we kept the rest. Should I weed it down a bit so there are fewer keywords?

Thanks for your input,
Pam

[jimbanks]

Local based Adwords is always a little tricky.

The fact you are are restricting by zip code means you can be more generic with keywords.

Match type might also be an issue.

0.5% CTR for local based ads is pretty low. 1-3 clicks a week and $20 spend means you are paying $7 a click is that right?

Adwords Express might be a good idea, set up a Google+ Local page, get some reviews from clients, use Social Extensions.

Hard to give specifics without seeing more, happy to help out if you need it.

[LucidSW]

The system will show ads as long as you have enough left in the budget. What it can't do is create impressions. If only 10 people a day use your keywords, that's your market. Increasing the budget will not change that.

Also, sounds like you have the content network turned on. Not a good idea to mix it with search, they should be separate. Your content campaign should be different too. Remember they are not searching for you but you are trying to pull them in.

[PamAllen68]

Thank you both. You all gave me some good ideas and dispelled a few misunderstandings about the system.

Back to work. lol Thanks again
Pam

[phranque]

note that zip code-specific geotargeting works for searchers who have set their google location to that zip code or their ISP is located in that zip code but is inaccurate in many cases.
i would suggest a more generic zip-targeted campaign and then a more specific metro area-targeted campaign and then set your bids, your keyword focus and your budget accordingly.
make sure you use the local identity terms in your keywords for the wider campaign such as western cityname and local towns and neighborhoods in your service area and perhaps even negative keywords such as downtown cityname, west/central/north cityname, etc that are outside your service area.