Right now, you’re wasting budget in your AdWords account. You’re not alone.
Every day, we see AdWords budgets wasted and squandered on poor quality traffic that will never convert into leads or sales.
Worse still, that budget could have been spent on clicks that would have converted into leads or sales. The dreaded AdWords double-whammy!
In this post, we explore simple techniques you can use to save AdWords budget right now.
Remove broad-match keywords
AdWords keyword match types are one of the foundations of an effective campaign and one technique that sadly, many AdWords advertisers get horribly wrong, wasting hundreds or thousands of pounds.
Negative keywords
Keyword research and data in your AdWords campaigns should reveal search queries matching your keywords. Check the Search Terms Report.
Since broad match, modified broad-match and phrase-match keywords could match queries which contain your keyword, it is important to add negative keywords to prevent your ads showing and wasting budget on clicks for irrelevant or low intent queries.
The phrase match ‘mens suits’ can still match:
- blue mens suits
- mens suit hire
- mens suits edinburgh
- cheap mens suit
- mens suits from men in black
- how to make mens suits
Again, some of that traffic is pretty good and some pretty bad.
Adding negative keywords to your ad groups and/or campaigns will help to exclude the budget you’re wasting on the low intent or irrelevant traffic.
Use high-intent search terms
Following on from the theme of high-intent traffic, it’s important to consider the intent of the user which is represented by a query.
- ‘buy jigsaws’ sounds great, but that’s a power tool as well as a box of pieces you make a picture from. ‘1000 piece jigsaw’ will convert better, or ‘bosch jigsaw’ depending on your products, of course.
- ‘letting agents’ seems a dead cert, but ‘letting agents mayfair’ has a much greater chance of converting into a lead. There’s a further issue with this particular term too – we’ve no way of knowing if the searcher is a landlord or a tenant – and no realistic way of qualifying that either, sadly.
- ‘tv accessories’ is much likely to convert than ‘hdmi cables’, although better still would be ‘5m 4k hdmi cable’ and dozens of other colours, features and lengths.
You should have conversion tracking installed and working effectively in which case you’ll be able to see the conversion rate and the cost per conversion for each keyword and query matching it.
With AdWords and Google Analytics connected, you’ll also be able to measure the bounce rate for each keyword and query too.
Check display campaigns for rogue placements
It’s possible that your campaigns are not only advertising on Google Search, but also on the Google Display Network too. Check the settings for each of your campaigns.
You might also be choosing to run targeted Display or Remarketing campaigns.
Either way, in your Campaigns and Ad Groups, you’ll be able to see a list of which pages and websites your ad appeared on, which spent budget and which produced conversions or view through conversions.
For those pages or sites that didn’t produce conversions or view-through conversions but did spend your money, adjust bids downwards or exclude money wasting placements completely.
Check Display campaigns which might be using mobile app placements
Check that mobile app placements are excluded in the settings of any Display campaigns you’re running. Unless your objectives are brand reach, it’s likely that they’re wasting a heap of your AdWords budget.
See: How to Stop Mobile Apps eating your AdWords Budget
Optimise bid adjustments for locations
Hidden away in the Locations tab of your campaigns, you can segment your campaign spend by location.
Using this data, it is possible to identify towns, cities or even countries or specific postcodes which might be costing you precious budget but not converting.
The data doesn’t always make sense – often there’s no immediately logical reason why searchers in Nottingham don’t buy your product, but those in Cardiff can’t get enough of it.
Adjust bids accordingly or in extreme circumstances, exclude specific locations altogether.
Optimising bid adjustments on devices
The Internet has changed significantly in the last few years. The growth of mobile Internet use has been swift and astonishing with mobile search now surpassing desktop searches.
In your AdWords Campaigns and Ad Groups, nestled in the settings tab, you’ll find that you can segment your data and budget by device type.
Before you start hacking away and reducing bids for mobile devices which don’t convert, think carefully.
If the keyword and query are relevant and have high intent, they should convert. If they don’t convert on mobile devices, that could be because your site doesn’t have a good mobile user experience.
It is often the case that a user’s journey starts on mobile but ends on desktop too, so take care to analyse the data to make sure your not removing a valuable step in the search funnel.
Adjusting bids will save your AdWords budget, but could also miss a huge number of leads and sales through your website.
