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6 PPC Secrets to Stop Wasting Money
Stop wasting money and start seeing sales!
Sick of pouring money into PPC campaigns and not seeing the returns you’d expect? We’re here to help!
Below are six commonly missed secrets we use to transform our client’s advertising efforts and stop unnecessary spending.
Don’t feel like reading? Sign up, we’ll handle the rest! But if you have some time and want to see a tip or two, keep reading!
PPC Money Saving Secret 1:
Turn Off Search Partners & Display Networks
What are these Network settings?
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- Google search partners: This setting means that your ads will display on Google owned properties other than the expected Google Search pages.
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- Display Network: This setting means that your ad will show in Google’s display ad placements, like at the top of web pages or apps.
Why turn Search Partners & Display Networks off?
The traffic from “Google search partners” is usually cheaper, but the quality is regularly poor. Misclicks from apps, clicks from intrusive ads on random websites, this is the kind of traffic you’re paying for with this setting enabled.
Including the “Display Network” setting makes sense if you are running display ads for Branding or Remarketing purposes, but it should not be enabled for search campaigns. You are likely catching people just browsing sites or apps with their mind on other things by using these ads, so your search ad, urging people to click, will likely be ignored, or worse, accidentally clicked and then closed.
How to Turn Off Networks in Google Ads:
- Log into your Google Ads account.
- Navigate to the campaign you want to edit.
- Click on the “Campaign Settings” tab.
- Scroll down to the “Networks” section.
- Uncheck the boxes for “Include Google search partners” and/or “Include Google Display Network” as needed.
We help align campaigns to your goals
It’s important to carefully consider your campaign goals and target audience before making changes to the above. The “Google Display Network” is great for re-marketing, event announcements, or branding campaigns.
For more help aligning campaign settings to your goals. Get in touch with us!
PPC Money Saving Secret 2:
Ditch Greedy “Broad Match” Keywords
What are “Keyword Match Types”?
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- Broad Match: Google shows your ad for searches that are related to your keyword, even if they don’t contain the exact words. This can lead to a sometimes MUCH wider reach at the cost of relevance.
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- Phrase Match: Your ad will show for searches that include your keyword phrase or close variations. This offers a balance between overall reach and relevance.
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- Exact Match: Your ad will only show for searches that match your keyword exactly or close variations. This is the most targeted match type, but it will naturally limit your reach.
For example, if your keyword was phrase match: “yoga classes” you would show for searches such as “beginner yoga classes” but also “yoga lessons”. However, if your keyword was exact match, it would only show for the search [yoga classes] OR very close approximations like [yoga class].
Why use only Phrase & Exact Match?
While broad match keywords can be tempting for their wider reach, they often lead to irrelevant clicks and wasted budget. You can combat this using “Negative Keywords” but it’ll be a constant battle. By focusing only on phrase and exact match keywords, you can improve the quality of your traffic, lower your cost-per-click (CPC), and avoid wasting money on irrelevant searches.
How to Adjust Keyword Match Types in Google Ads:
- Log into your Google Ads account.
- Navigate to the campaign you want to edit.
- Click on the “Keywords” tab.
- Identify the keywords you want to modify.
- Click on the “Match Type” dropdown menu next to the keyword and select the desired match type (Phrase or Exact).
build hyper-focused, profitable campaigns
It’s not always a bad thing to receive traffic from searches you don’t specifically target, as you’ll sometimes find successful search terms you otherwise wouldn’t have. Learn how we use keyword match types and the resulting search terms to build hyper-focused, profitable campaigns.
PPC Money Saving Secret 3:
Only Spend When Users Have Time or Energy!
What is Ad Scheduling?
Ad scheduling, or dayparting, allows you to control the specific days and times your ads are shown, ensuring they reach your target audience when they’re most active, or likely to complete the action you’re hoping they will off the back of your ad.
Why You Should Incorporate Ad Scheduling
Using ad scheduling for your PPC campaigns will help to cut wasted spend by focusing or limiting spend to periods users are more likely to engage with your site or content. This will positively influence click through rates, conversion rates, time on page, bounce rates, and more.
(All metrics Google loves to see for advertisers – and is secretly rewarded with lower cost per clicks thanks to a hidden metric “Ad Rank”).
Additionally, ad scheduling helps you better adapt to audience behavior patterns—like never targeting customer working hours, or increasing bids on evenings and weekends. This not only helps to cut costs, but can also give you the chance to appear higher in search results when a customer visit is most valuable.
How to Set Up Ad Scheduling in Google Ads:
- Log into your Google Ads account.
- Navigate to the campaign you want to edit.
- Click on the “Ad Schedule” tab.
- Set specific days and times when you want your ads to show.
- You can create multiple schedules for different days of the week or specific time periods.
You should consider using historical data and analytics tools to identify which days and times are most valuable to you, then align your advertising schedule with this data to maximise your budget.
PPC Money Saving Secret 4:
Block Costly Irrelevant Searches
About Negative Keywords
Negative keywords are search terms that you don’t want to trigger your ads. By adding negative keywords, you can prevent your ads from showing for irrelevant searches which only waste your budget.
Think of them as the exact opposite to keywords. You can use the same match types; [Exact] , “Phrase”, Broad, to be as sweeping or specific as you’d like. Although, we’d recommend sticking to “Phrase” and [Exact] match types to avoid blocking any relevant terms in the process.
Why should you use Negative Keywords?
Negative keywords help refine your keyword targeting, leading to higher-quality traffic and better conversion rates. They improve your click-through rate (CTR) by ensuring your ads are only displayed to users searching for terms relevant to your business.
Additionally, using negative keywords (and therefore increasing ad relevance and user experience) you can improve your “Ad Rank” in Google, potentially lowering your cost-per-click (CPC) as well as helping you nab the top spot in search results more often.
You should be consistently managing and updating your negative keyword list, especially for campaigns which use Broad or “Phrase” match types.
How to Add Negative Keywords in Google Ads:
- Log into your Google Ads account.
- Navigate to the campaign you want to edit.
- Click on the “Insights and reports” dropdown.
- Click on the “Search terms” tab
- Here, you’ll see data by search term from users.
- Find keywords wasting your budget, ticking the box to the left of them.
- After selecting the wasteful search terms, use the blue bar at the top of the table to add them as negative keywords. You can set these to either an AdGroup or Campaign level, which you’ll need to decide on depending on if it’s irrelevant to just it’s AdGroup or totally irrelevant for the whole campaign.
- Click “Save.”
PPC Money Saving Secret 5:
Only Advertise To People In Specific Areas
What is location targeting?
Location targeting allows you to show your ads to users in specific geographic locations. This can be done at a Country, County, City, Town, or even address level. You can also specify a radius around those locations, or simply target the locations themselves.
Why you should use Location Targeting
Utilising location targeting in your campaigns helps you to focus your ads on the specific geographic areas your ideal customers are located. Maybe you know customers will only drive so far to your business, or there is a competitor you don’t want to waste money bidding against in a nearby town. That’s when location targeting comes in handy.
By using an informed location targeting approach, you prevent your ads from being shown to users outside your service area who are unlikely to become customers, wasting money on expensive regions which eat up budget which could be used for ads elsewhere, and focusing in on the areas you are most likely to find business.
How to Set Up Location Targeting in Google Ads:
- Log into your Google Ads account.
- Navigate to the campaign you want to edit.
- Click on the “Campaign settings” tab.
- Scroll down to the “Locations” section.
- Select your target locations:
Target specific locations: Choose countries, regions, cities, or postal codes.
Target a radius around a specific location: Specify a radius in miles or kilometers.
Exclude specific locations: Prevent your ads from showing in certain areas.
Target specific locations: Choose countries, regions, cities, or postal codes.
Target a radius around a specific location: Specify a radius in miles or kilometers.
Exclude specific locations: Prevent your ads from showing in certain areas.
Google defaults location targeting settings to include users who “Are in, regularly in, or who’ve shown interest in your included locations”.
This means that if someone who lives in Oxford, but is regularly in London for work, searches for “Pilates Studio”, Google may show them Ads for both London and Oxford Businesses.
While this seems fine on the surface, if you have a business for which clients usually only interact with on the weekends, you do not want to spend money advertising to people who are only in your area on work days.
Fully Utilise The Power of google Ads Targeting
Google has a plethora of settings available to maximise the results of your campaigns. Most of them are under-utilised due to poor visibility and lack of explanation in the platform. Over the years we’ve helped clients spend millions through Google Ads. We’re confident we can make yours a success. Get in touch to find out how.
PPC Money Saving Secret 6:
Track Goals Using Google’s Free Tools
What is Conversion Tracking?
Conversion tracking allows you to measure the effectiveness of your PPC campaigns via the use of tools like Google Analytics or Google Tag Manager. Google Analytics can feed data back into Google Ads to help track campaign performance, and Google Tag Manager can help you set up hyper-specific goals to track user behaviour or create audience groups to be used in re-marketing.
Why You Should Incorporate Conversion Tracking
Conversion tracking is crucial for reducing wasted spend and maximising your campaign budgets. You’ll be able to see which ads, keywords, and bid strategies lead to valuable customer actions like bookings, email sign-ups, contact forms filled, even phone calls.
This helps you make sure your budget is invested in Locations, Campaigns, AdGroups, Keywords, and even times of the day which deliver the highest return on investment.
Conversion tracking will also help you identify keywords which receive clicks, but for some reason don’t lead to any valuable actions from visitors. This’ll allow you to look deeper into why this might be, then a/b test to try and improve results, or adjust the Campaign accordingly.
Conversion tracking also means you’ll be able to utilise Google’s increasingly effective “smart bidding” strategies, such as Target CPA or Target ROAS. It also lets you test and improve your landing pages, see how different marketing channels are performing, and make better business decisions by understanding what your customers like.
Setting up conversions in Google Ads can be tricky, especially if you don’t already have Google Analytics, or have Google Analytics linked to your Google Ads account.
If you DO have Google Analytics AND have linked it to your Google Ads account, then you can import conversion goals by:
- Logging into your Google Ads account.
- Navigating to the “Goals” tab.
- Under “Conversions,” select “Summary.”
- Click the “+ Create conversion action” button.
- Select “Import”, and tick “Google Analytics 4 properties”, then “Web”.
- Choose the goal to import into Google Ads, then choose the “Action optimization”
- Once the conversion action is imported, you’ll start tracking that metric in Google Ads.
Get clarity on ppc spend
If you don’t have Google Analytics, cannot link your current Google Analytics account to Google Ads, or are having trouble setting up goals (conversion actions), reach out to us. We make sure our clients can track campaign performance, so they know every penny is being put to good use. Sign up to find out how.
