Few days ago I was talking to a B2B customer about the performance of their Google Ads campaign.
This company offers very technical graphic services to companies and decided to create one single Google Ads Search campaign including all their services.
Overall performance of the campaign was good – in spite of its low budget.
He was asking me why a specific keyword of his campaign was not performing, in the sense that this keyword was not receiving any traffic (no views and no clicks).

Reason 1: one campaign for many service lines

First Possible Reason: one single campaign including different services and different families of keywords. This means that the most popular services “cannibalize” keywords with less popularity which do not find any remaining budget to appear and trigger the ad. Solution: explode the campaign in different campaigns focused on single service lines.

Reason 2: people do not search for your keyword because they do not know it


Second Possible Reason: the keyword does not trigger the ad because people do not know it and do not search for it in Google.
This is a common problem for B2Bs – especially for those offering niche, technical and innovative services. It is not granted that their potential customer knows the names of the services/solution which can solve a problem of his. Sometimes they do not even know that they have a problem. Besides, B2B is often innovation, it is to put in the market something that did not exist before. How can we expect that people know about this and search for this in Google?
It is fundamental to know how our potential customers name our services – by their need, by phrases describing a solution to a problem, by a “how to…” or – if we are lucky and are in front of a more educated customer, by the exact name of our service.
It is important to understand how our potential customers could look for us in the different stages of their buying funnel (online and offline). This way we can create more valuable content and can be there any time customers could needs us (and not just when they look for us typing our exact names on Google).Re

Reason 3: check the quality score

The third reason why a keyword could not accrue clicks and views can be related to its quality score, so its overall quality inside the campaign.

The Quality Score can be improved with immediate action (i.e. increase CPC in order to improve the Ad ranking and – as a consequence – the Click Thorugh Rate) and with some more strategic action related to content, web site, ads copywriting, call to action, value created for the user… This strategy can be connected to the 2 previous points (campaign architecture according to the different service promoted, identification of the relevan queries for the users…).

Conclusion

To conclude. There can be several reasons why a keyword could not trigger your ad. We suggest to review the technical structure of the campaign but also to work on architecture strategy and on content production. This would improve keyword performance but also the overall quality of your communication.