Adwords and German user habits

We are currently running an adwords campaign for a financial job website in Germany.

The problem we are having is that we don't seem to be getting very many clicks at all, much less than our other foreign compaigns like France for example.

Is this normal for Germany?

Apparently it seems that German users when searching for jobs tend to search very generic, so instead of searching for accounting job, they would just search for job and browse through a full jobsite to find the accounting job. Since our website deals only with financial jobs, it seems that this could be the reason for getting such low clicks?

Even when we went for generic keywords like jobs, because our ad text was for financial jobs only, it seems this caused a low click through.

Are we missing something?
Do Germans not like clicking on ads in general?

Anyone else have any advice for us or experienced a similar problem with converting traffic from Germany using adwords or any other advertising systems.

Perhaps there may be something we are missing that could help us gain traffic.

Any advice or comments appreciated.

An ex-roomate works for a Hamburg ad company that spends at least $80k a month on Adwords & Overture on behalf of its clients.. so I would guess that ze Germans liebe die klicken.

Are you sure that the site is delivering ads targetted for Germany? If it is part of an english operation maybe some meta tags or other obscure content in english are causing incorrect language delivery.. that would not help things at all.

You have to remember that the German unemployment rate is very high, maybe there is some skepticism that clicking your ads would result in a genuine job offer. Kind of like coming into a prison and offering keys to all the prisoners, it may be a 'yeah, right' situation.

Other than that, you may want to exam your basic keyword strategy..

In my opinions, Germans love to solve problems structured. Isn't looking for "JOB" first, then inside the results for "ACCOUNTING" the proper way?

Is your ad in German? If it is not in German, you probably can increase the clicks by 100% by just translating the ad to proper German.

Do you feel your ad matches the German mentality? Maybe you want to check your competition how they are targeting.

I am fluent in German, if you post your ad-text here, I would be happy to check it out. It may take me a while to do so, since I'll be travelling for a couple of days.

Best Regards,
Ben