What Do You Do When Your Ads Aren't Getting The Results You Want

By Jim Butz, Sales and Marketing expert with over 20 years of real world experience strategizing and executing sales and marketing plans for startups, small business and nonprofits.

If your ads aren’t translating into sales, the immediate answer is: stop the ads!  :) However, this is a perfect time to evaluate what’s happening.

In most cases, this issue is likely an operational challenge, which means you can probably address it quickly. The positive takeaway is that you’ve already established a metric between your advertising and sales — that's a good starting point. Now, it’s time to look further up your funnel to identify where the breakdown is occurring.

If there is no water (sales) coming from the pipeline, start at the end and work back

Start at the bottom of the funnel: Are you getting sales-qualified leads? If people are visiting your website, store, or place of business, engaging with your team, expressing interest (adding items to a cart, requesting a demo, or speaking with an employee), but not converting — the issue may not be with your ads but rather with your sales process. Potential sales challenges could include:

• Technical issues: A bug in your shopping cart or checkout process for example

• Educational gaps: Your sales team may lack product knowledge.

• Sales approach: Perhaps your employees are too aggressive or passive in their approach.

If prospects aren’t engaging with your sales process at all, it’s time to look further up the funnel. Are the ads driving traffic to your website or store? If yes, then assess your conversion points:

• Are you directing people to the right landing pages?

• Is your messaging aligned with customer intent?

Alongside evaluating your funnel, you want to evaluate your ads. Exam if your ads are attracting the right audience, are in the right spot, in the right channels. Plus you will want to evaluate the ad content itself:

• Are the visuals compelling?

• Is the messaging clear and relevant?

• Are your ads appearing in the right channels for your audience?

The good thing is that we have many tools and data points to develop metrics in evaluating all of these components. In addition, you may want to create your own metrics. 

Beyond this specific ad issue it is a good time this situation as a valuable data point to refine your marketing strategy and tactics. Strategically, ask yourself:

• Does our value proposition need adjustment? (compare this ad with other marketing channels, or with existing customers)

• Are we targeting the right audience? (maybe the ads where in a place our audience doesn’t visit or we have tried several channels and we need to expand/contract/adjust our target audience)

Tactically, consider:

• Are we advertising in the right channels?

• Are we targeting ads at the optimal time? (For example, snow shovels generally don’t sell well in summer.)

By examining both strategic and tactical elements, you’ll uncover actionable insights to improve your marketing performance.