Budgeting For Your AdWords Accounts
Google AdWords may be one of the most popular and useful online advertising platforms in the world right now with multiple features that allow you to advertise your products effectively in Google Search engines and Google partnered sites. Despite this, if your account is not properly managed, Google will potentially expand the reach of your ads, ignoring their relevance to the premiere target audience and ultimately cost you more while resulting in a poor ROI. Since AdWords operates on a pay per click (PPC) basis, Google has no problem wasting your advertising budget on useless clicks or impressions. So, to avoid this happening to you, here are 4 effective ways to help you stay within your budget and to make sure that your ads are shown to the correct people.
1. Reduce the Amount of Broad Match Terms
The default setting for search terms in Google AdWords is called broad match, which sounds exactly like you think it does. With broad match, Google will further expand the scope of your keywords to ensure that your ads receive impressions on terms that are somewhat relevant to your keywords. This will ultimately result in you receiving a lot of clicks and impressions on your ads, but they may be from a completely irrelevant audience meaning that you are wasting your budget using broad match. To ensure precision targeting for your AdWords account, stick to using phrase match and exact match. This may reduce your overall impressions and clicks, but at least the clicks and impressions you’ll have will be from a relevant target audience.
2. Review Your Search Terms Report Weekly
I’m not exaggerating when I say that your search terms report is the Robin to your Batman, without it, Gotham would be in jeopardy. But all jokes aside, the review of your search terms report is essential to your success with Google AdWords. It provides you with an analysis of the terms that your ads are showing up for in Google. Therefore, if there are any irrelevant terms that you are showing for you can simply add them to your negative keywords list and make your accounts as precise as needed. To optimize this even further, combine the analysis of your search terms report with an analysis of the keyword data query in the Google Search Console. This will display all the terms that your business is showing up for organically so therefore, if there are any irrelevant terms you can simply add them to your negative keywords list to fine tune your campaigns even more and save you money on irrelevant clicks moving forward. This review needs to be done at least once a week mainly because it’s almost impossible to know every term that you do not want to be shown for when you are creating your campaigns. By having an initial list of terms, you know you do not want your ads to show for is a great start, but once you begin expanding your negative keyword list over time you’ll notice a drastic change in the precision of your campaigns meaning that you will not be spending money on wasted clicks.
3. Utilize Geo-Targeting for Your Campaigns
This may seem very straight forward, but make sure that your ads are targeted at the correct geographic audience. Google’s geo-targeting is very precise, allowing you to target based on a Country, Province/State, City/Town, or even a postal code. Once you have your geo-targeting set, make sure you analyze how each geographic segment is performing. If there is one area that just does not respond to your ads, or even just a location that is not performing to your initial standards, adjust your bid to make sure that your ad is not showing as much in that specific location and then reallocate your bid percentage from the poor performing area to a better performing geographic area.
4. Readjust Your Device Segmentation
Like geo-targeting, your device segmentation can be adjusted as well to ensure that your ads are shown on prominent devices; desktop, mobile, and tablets. Once you have an initial review, you can observe what your target audience is responding to the best and then reallocate the focus of your ads to the best performing device while reducing the impressions on other devices. This will not only save you money, but it should also ensure that your conversions are still being met by focusing your ads on the most prominent device.
