Why you might be pouring your AdWords budget down a drain
One aspect of an online marketing campaign is the use of Pay-Per-Click advertising or PPC as it can be more commonly known. The benefits of this method of promotion can be incredible in terms of profit margins for your business.
Alternatively this can also have the completely opposite effect on your business. If your Adwords account isn’t setup properly, you could be throwing a lot of money away.
Real Example
Let’s go into a bit of a backstory here.
A previous client of mine actually had an existing AdWords account which I ended up taking control of with the goal of looking to optimise their budget to get more value for their money. The account was set up by themselves and all keywords and ad groups also done in-house.
The budget each month was £1000 and they were hitting that without fail almost every time. Looking further into their account, although their keyword choices were well within reason and very targeted towards their product ranges and target audiences, they had unfortunately set all keywords to be triggered under broad match.
This meant that they would end up appearing for results of terms that although may have contained their keywords, were completely unrelated.
To give you an example, let’s say that their target keyword was related to brown shoes because they only sold brown shoes, but this term was set to broad match. This would mean that they would be triggering adverts on search results relating to green shoes, blue shoes, black shoes, red shoes and so on. Hopefully, you can see the potential issues here.
They would end up getting clicks on their advert for unrelated terms where people weren’t in the market to buy their product as they initially wanted to purchase blue shoes. Over time, this meant that a lot of their budget was actually wasted on an audience who weren’t looking for their products.
Essentially the quickest way to solve this issue initially was to switch all of their keywords over to “Exact Match”. This meant that there were no ambiguities within their targetting. From now on they would only appear for searches relating to “brown shoes”.
From there, the ad groupings were tightened into much more focused groups. All adverts for one product grouped together and the ads completely tailored for those terms, rather than all keywords under one group with really broad adverts for all of those terms.
This helped them to improve their ad relevancy score and in turn helped to lower their cost per click on each term.
The Results
Effectively the changes that I put into place managed to slash their monthly AdWords spend in half within the space of a month, whilst also improving their conversion rate dramatically. Now that the traffic that was being sent to their website was targeted and ready to buy their orders skyrocketed.
It also meant that the remaining monthly budget could be re-allocated to different channels like social advertising on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.
What you can do
Some quick and easy ways to diagnose if your AdWords campaign is working for you would be the following:-
- Ensure that you have linked google analytics with your AdWords account.
- Review the number of orders coming through via paid advertising. If the conversion rate is extremely low you should probably have a look into tailoring your account more or getting a professional in.
- If you don’t have goal tracking set up to monitor this, then there’s your first serious issue. Set up conversion tracking immediately.
- Review the keywords bringing traffic to your site from AdWords.
- Analytics –>Acquisition–>AdWords–>Search queries
- Any keywords that you don’t want, start adding to your list of negative keywords within AdWords.
These are just a few of the telltale signs that you need to optimise your account more to ensure that you get the most for your money.
Please make sure you check these things regularly as a poorly setup AdWords account could spell disaster for your business if given too much free reign and not kept in check.