How to Reduce Wasted Google Ad Spend

Everyone wants to stretch their dollar a bit further and finding where money is being wasted is the first step. When it comes to an AdWords, or Google Ads, account there are many places to start to help make your budget last longer. Reducing your wasted spend can help increase clicks, conversions, and revenue, all while keeping the budget the same. Now if you have an agency or employee in house managing your PPC account they should be reviewing these tasks periodically. If you’re managing the business’s account you can implement these changes yourself to ensure you’re getting everything you can from the account.

Review Your Search Terms

Once in the account navigate to the keywords, then select the Search Term button at the top of the page. This will pull a report of all the keywords users queried to see your ads. A good starting point would be to set the date range for the past 30 days and review this list every 30 days or so. As you scroll through the terms you may see users are searching for terms that are closely related to your items, but not relevant to your site. These keywords can be added as negative keywords and Google won’t show your

For instance, if you’re a car dealership users will be searching for terms related to car dealership. However you won’t want ads to show for searches such as “toy cars”. The term “toy” should be added to your negative keyword list.

Best practice is to review your search terms often and be adding negative keywords. It’s a terrible feeling seeing money spent on a term not related to your website.

Mobile Optimization

By enabling mobile-optimized ads you can ensure users are being shown ads that they can easily interact with. Making mobile ads that are targeted at mobile users can help increase click thru rate (CTR) and conversion rate. These are ads that make the user-experience smooth and effortless.

Mobile users and desktop users interact with an ad differently, thus your ads need to be tailored a specific way. For instance, mobile users prefer calling where desktop users prefer forms. Advertisers can push for more click to call type extensions for their mobile ads. This then increases CTR and quality score, reducing your spend.

Review Your Search Area

Ideally, this should be done properly when the account is setup, however, it’s great to revisit often. Understanding where your users are searching from can help refine your spend and increase clicks.

Let’s say you’re running an ice cream shop, how far would someone drive for ice cream? Ten miles? We wouldn’t want to show ads to a user who is outside this geo-location. With geo-targeting we can make bid adjustments based on where people are. Maybe we want to make sure our ads show to users within 5 miles, but it’s not as important to users 7 miles away. We can increase the bid adjustment for the 5 mile radius, increasing the likelihood of a click.

Review Time of Search

Using the same scenario above, now you have the locations of your ice cream eaters it’s time to look at the time they get ice cream. The ice cream shop is probably open something like 11am to 11pm. So why would you show ads while the business is closed? Also, you only want users calling your business while someone is there to answer the phone.

Looking for additional ways to make your budget go further? Wondering if your digital marketing team is doing all it can? Contact us today and learn how we can help your business.