Has Your Paid Search Campaign Got a Money Leak?

Patch that hole in your budget bag!

Ever wondered if you are wasting money on your AdWords advertising? Erin Sagin for Wordstream states that, “the typical business wastes 25% or more of their total paid searches spend”. This is a problem and trying to figure out wasted spend on Google AdWords can be challenging. Here are some tips and tricks in helping to reduce the amount of wasted spend in your AdWords Account.

Negative Keywords

 One simple mistake that can wreak havoc on your account is not having negative keywords in your account. In most instances you can predict what your negative keywords are going to be for your business. 1 in 5 small businesses do not use negative keywords, according to Sagin, who also goes on to say that there are some cases where negative keywords can be challenging to predict. She suggests that if you detect that a searcher is looking for something that you do not offer, eliminate the possibility of showing your ad to them by setting a negative keyword.

To combat ad spend wastage, find out what your keywords are pulling in regards to search traffic and check your Search Term Reports often. You will then be able to filter through any search terms that are irrelevant. This will also help you build a negative keywords list in your campaigns, but more importantly reduce any wasted spend that could be accruing in your AdWords account.

Broad Match Keywords

 One of the biggest mistakes you can make is setting all your keywords up as ‘Broad Match’. This can have a negative impact on your AdWords Account. Broad Match keywords allow Google to show your ad anytime a query is related to or contains a part of your keyword. For example, having the keyword “low carb diet plan” in your ad copy may prompt your ads to show on searches for “Carb – free Food”, “low calorie recipes”, “Mediterranean diet plans”, etc.  This is no good if these other search terms are not relevant to your business. Broad Match keywords allow high search volumes or more search traffic to come through to the AdWords account, however, you are also running the risk of attracting un-qualified searches which will result in wasted spend. If you have Broad Match keywords in your AdWords campaign, it is best to spend a bit of time going through these and checking what type of traffic the Broad Match keywords are bringing to your business, but more importantly, whether they are actually bringing in the results that are relevant to your business.

Ad Scheduling

Have a look at your ad scheduling. There are certain times and days of the week that may perform worse than others.  By determining what your better performing days are and removing the poor days or hours, you can help in reducing wasted spend.  Scheduling your ads to not show or to run at a reduced bid during the quiet times of the week is another way to help reduce wasted spend.

Mobile Optimisation

If you are bidding on mobile searchers you can reduce wasted spend by ensuring you have enabled mobile optimised ads. Mobile preferred search ads are beneficial for the end user that is searching via mobile devices. There is nothing worse than searching for something on a mobile device and the ads do not accommodate the device.

Location Targeting

When looking at Location Targeting in the settings it can seem quite straight forward but it can actually cause a lot of wasted advertising spend in AdWords.  Google will try to ensure that your ads are getting a lot of impressions. Your ads will be shown to people searching within your targeted area, but they will also be shown to searches (people) who are searching or viewing pages about your targeted location. You may notice from time to time from your Geo reports that there is a location in there that is odd. This is likely the culprit. This setting may be beneficial for some industries or advertisers; however, it can lead to a lot of unqualified clicks for others. Google will default to target “people in, searching for, or show interest in my targeted location” which means they’ll display your ads to people based on both physical location and apparent search intent. This setting is not unusual, because it allows you to get the most impressions.  This can however be edited to include only “people in my targeted location” or “people searching for or who show interest in my targeted location”.

Using the example above, Sagin says, in an article about Geo-targeting, that if you select the physical location only option (“People in my targeted location”), your ads will only show to Google users who are actually in Brisbane, resulting in no more impressions and clicks from users who might have Brisbane related search intent but are searching from Melbourne.

These 5 tips will help in ensuring you are covering the basics in reducing the amount of wasted spend that could be happening in your AdWords account. It always pays to get the basic elements right at the beginning to ensure you have success in your online marketing, and can put your budget towards a better ROI.

Let the Search Marketing specialists at SponsoredLinX help you get the most out of your online marketing budget today, and call us on 1300 859 600.

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