Google Ads wastes a huge portion of your paid media budget as they want you to spend more and then, some more. Fancy words such as AI, ML, Automation act as a catalyst for Google Ads to take control of our accounts and increase our spend (and thus also our wasteful spend). Thus, every digital marketer needs to take matters into his/her own hands and implement these strategies that go against Google Ads best practices to actually get the best results from Google Ads campaigns.
Let’s take a deeper dive into these strategies and help you implement them in your Google Ads account:
Segment keyword match types & use budget cascading to utilize higher spends on exact and phrase match
Exact and Phrase matches have three advantages over broad match
Cheaper CPC
Higher Conversion Rates
Predictable Search Volume, CPC and Budgets
Thus, segregating campaigns on basis of keyword match types gives you more predictability and control over budget distribution resulting into better performance
Regularly update negative keyword lists using search query report
While targeting Phrase and Broad match keyword types, you may notice irrelevant queries creeping in and eating up your precious budget. Thus, you need to regularly review search query reports and add irrelevant queries into negative keyword lists.
Avoid adding broad matches to your negative keywords as you may end up negating relevant keywords from your targeting.
Opt out of “Search on Display” setting in search ads
Google Ads smartly gobbles up your budget in the guise of “Search on Display” in your regular search campaigns. In your reports you might mistake it for search campaign spend but it actually is low quality display spend.
While Google Ads mentions that only “extra” budget will be utilized for this purpose and you will get “additional conversions”, a thorough analysis would almost always reveal that the budget meant for your important keywords was spent on low quality display traffic leading to wasteful spend and low RoI.
Use Portfolio Bid strategies but NOT Shared Budgets to maximize AI as well as returns
Portfolio bids are one of the best additions to Google Ads. How so? You get to utilize learning from multiple campaigns, which otherwise may not happen due to limited conversion data from a single campaign. Shared budgets on the other hand work anti-budget-cascading strategy that we discussed earlier. Shared budgets will skew your spend more towards low quality or irrelevant broad match terms leading to a mediocre performance, especially if you have segmented campaigns based on keyword group performance.
Implement max and min CPC bids in Portfolio Bid strategies to control wasteful spend on high CPC bids
Along with the multiple AI benefits, there is another major advantage to Portfolio Bids, you get to put caps on min and max CPC bids. Max CPC bids allow you to utilize your budget wisely and not overspend on expensive KWs (I have seen Google Ads bid up to $500 CPC when their AI is left unchecked on a measly daily budget of $1500 for the a portfolio of campaigns) while min CPC bid allows you to weed out low quality traffic allowing you to focus more upmarket.
Ensure location Settings are updated to “Presence in targeted location” and NOT “Presence and Interest in targeted location”
For local or international business, targeting is of utmost importance. As a local business, you may not sell outside a given territory and as an international business you may want to showcase different ads in different languages containing unique offers for a specific region.
Use this setting to ensure that you reach the intended audience with your Google Ads campaigns and your ads are properly geo-targeted to reduce any wasteful spend.
Ad Scheduling – Show ads in hours with highest returns. Adjust bids for slow hours or completely remove them from schedule
While your ads can smoothly run and spend your budget equally across all hours, your targeted audience may not have a buying intent at all hours (such as meal timings are the important hours for restaurants) or your business may be closed during certain hours (such as for shops, doctors, lawyers, etc.)
It is imperative that you target the right hours (and days) to showcase your ads on Google and thus, reduce wasteful spending.
Cut wasteful spend on Mobile – mobile traffic converts at a much lower rate that desktop traffic
Mobile traffic has higher search volume and is great for branding. But is it the right placement to maximize your ad returns? More often than not, mobile traffic has lower CPC but also lower CVR, resulting in an overall higher CPL. Therefore the need to segregate mobile and desktop campaigns based on daily spends. And we need to find a sweet spot for mobile spend so that we can optimize the returns from our campaigns
Pro tips:
Duplicate your campaigns and target one set for desktop and the other one for mobile.
Keep mobile budget at 25-30% of your overall spends.
Lower the bid adjustments for mobile by 20-30%
Remove low quality PMax Placements
Remove apps using the interest category settings such as Games, Social, Transport, News and any other categories irrelevant to your business.
Regularly remove placements with <$6 CPM in the US as these will usually be low quality traffic websites or MFA sites.
These strategies will help you reduce wasteful spend in your PMax campaigns while targeting high quality traffic.
Remove “Brand” from PMax
Remove your brand from your PMax campaigns using exclusion list. This is to ensure that there is no cannibalization of spends between your brand campaigns and PMax campaigns.
This strategy helps in reducing any wasteful brand spends on Display, Youtube or other Google placements.
Now that you are saving a lot of ad spend, you can easily reinvest this in the best performing campaigns using the budget cascading strategy shared above. You can even go ahead and try advertising on a new platform such as Meta, LinkedIn, Bing or Tiktok; or simply save money for your business as a penny saved is a penny earned!
Do you want to improve the performance of your digital campaigns further or need help in realizing the true potential of your marketing efforts? Please reach out to us for expert guidance at pj@pragunjain.com