Updated August 22, 2023
As a business owner, it is important to wisely invest your time and money into things that will help your company thrive.
One key digital marketing strategy to consider is Google Ads, a form of pay-per-click marketing. PPC is the strategy of advertisers bidding on keywords and paying for each click on their advertisement from a user who has found their ad.
Monitoring your campaigns is essential to ensure that you are generating the highest ROI you can. If you aren’t taking a close look, you could lose out on a lot of money.
Here are the key places you can look in Google Ads to reduce costs!
1. Search Term Reports
Not checking your search term reports is one of the biggest mistakes you can make with a Google Ads campaign, but if you monitor this section you will be sure to cut unwanted costs.
This report will display all of the search queries that users made that led them to clicking on your ad. When looking over this report, it is important to determine which keywords you want to deem as “negative keywords.”
Negative keywords are words that you want to exclude from your keyword list because they are unwanted and irrelevant to your company. You then can narrow the keywords down into a more targeted audience. Negative keywords could include brand names; terms like “cheap,” “training,” or “free”; or others that are not relevant to your goals and company.
For example, as a marketing company, we diligently negative out terms like “plugin,” “tool,” “app,” and others that could be correlated to people looking for something related to marketing, but not with our offerings.
If you check your search term reports regularly, you can catch some of these words that do not fit in. Identifying them as negative keywords will eliminate any costs on unworthy clicks, therefore saving your money and focusing on a more targeted approach.
2. Keyword Match Type
One of the easiest ways to lower costs in 2023 is to add more broad match terms into your campaigns. However, while many broad match terms are low in cost, Google will allow many more terms to slip through, so it is essential to have a hefty negative keyword list applied to your ad group or campaign.
For example, when we target SEO agency broad, we also show for queries for:
- Marketing
- Digital marketing
- Internet marketing
- Online marketing
- Paid marketing
- Pay-per-click
- Social media marketing
- Website design
- Website development
- And much more
3. Quality Score
Your quality score has a great impact on the effectiveness of your Google Ads campaign. It will affect how much you pay for each click and how your ads perform.
First off, quality score is “Google’s rating of quality and relevance of both your keywords and PPC ads.” It is the relevance of your keywords, ads, and landing pages to the person viewing your ads. Google states that having a “higher quality score will lead to lower costs and better ad positions.”
Quality score is dependent on:
- Click-through rate (CTR)
- Relevance of keyword to ad group
- Landing page quality
- Relevance of ad copy
- History of Google Ads performance
With a high-quality score, you have the opportunity to lower your cost per click, yet have a high-positioned ad. This could save you some money!
Increasing quality score
Some things to keep in mind for improving your quality score:
- Keyword research – With this, you can uncover highly relevant keywords that are specific to your desired audience. You can also split keywords into different ad groups, such as “digital marketing company” and “digital marketing services.”
- Unique landing pages – You’ll want to create landing pages that connect with your targeted keywords and make unique ones for each ad group.
- Negative keywords – Continually monitor for negative keywords that will waste your money so you can mark them and keep irrelevant searches at bay.
- Landing page speed – Using Google’s Page Speed Insights, you can see what adjustments can be made.
4. Ad Schedule
A feature that is often overlooked in Google Ads is ad scheduling. The scheduler allows you to show your ad only whenever a customer searches it online, only during weekdays, or only during business hours.
With this feature, you can:
- Set specific days and hours during the week for your ad to appear
- Adjust your bids to increase or decrease on certain days or times
By default, your ad is set to show all day which could be very costly for your business and reduce your ROI.
Check in with your company. Determine which days and times are going to receive the most responses from your customers. Show your ads when you are most likely going to get conversions, leads, and, ultimately, sales! Through this feature, you can prevent displaying your ad at odd times, reducing irrelevant clicks and saving your money.
5. Targeting Opportunities
In Google Ads, you can target specific individuals based on certain geographic regions. This is called geo targeting. It allows you to choose the locations that you want your ad to appear in a country, city, postal code, or a radius around a location.
With geo targeting, you can focus on the areas that you know will perform better and eliminate those that will not. By targeting a certain location that your target customers reside in, the potential for your click-through rate (CTR) to increase is significant, leading to a higher quality score and lower CPC.
Targeting a specific region or location is found to be one of the most effective marketing strategies to cut costs on Google Ads.
6. Conversion Tracking
How will you know how effective your Google Ads are if you are not measuring the results? You have specific goals in mind, so accurately tracking results to make sure they are being met is key. With PPC, you are spending money on your campaigns with each click, so it’s imperative to make sure these campaigns are working efficiently.
Conversion tracking is where you set up “conversions” and determine if you are meeting them. Some common conversions include leads, sales, downloads, email sign-ups, and phone calls. Essentially, they can be anything you want that is measurable and vital to your business goals.
Once you set up accurate conversion tracking, you will be able to view the top performing metrics. These could include certain mediums, keywords, ads, campaigns, locations and various other factors. Gathering this information will aid you in discovering where to allocate your budget based on what is converting and what is not. Monitoring your conversions consistently will help you to stay on top of your campaigns and budget according to effectiveness.
Choose Sixth City for PPC Services!
With Sixth City Marketing’s PPC services, we can:
- Maximize your ROI by getting your ads in front of the right audience
- Help your company get noticed with unique ad copy
- Generate more qualified clicks, leads, sign ups, and sales
- Reduce wasted costs
We are industry experts who can create dynamic campaigns with our quality approach. Our team is dedicated to making your PPC campaign pay dividends for your company. Contact us to learn more about our services!
