Are you Wasting your Google Adwords Budget?

Is your PPC advertising as effective as it could be or are you wasting money? When we do Google Adwords audits, many of the companies have not correctly optimized their ad targeting and are throwing money away.

So to help you out we have created three top tips to help you reduce your Google Adwords spend and hopefully increase Click Through Rates.

Google Adwords has a few handy tools that help you discover the most effective PPC tactics. You can see what is and isn’t working and then adjust. You won’t get anywhere simply taking the old school scatter shot approach and treating your PPC campaign like a print media ad.

Here are three of the best Google Adwords tools to keep on top of your PPC ads:

Geo-Targeting

It is surprising how many businesses do not have any geo-targeting set up for their Ads. Many local businesses display their Ads nationally, even though they are only trying to attract local customers. This can be easily fixed by setting up the Ad placement correctly, to ensure your Ads will only display in geographical regions where you want to do business.

Monitoring Historical Click Data

Another technique often over looked is to look at the historic click through data. Set your timeframe within Google Adwords to display, the last few months, then view the Ad Keywords. You will now be able to see which keywords have triggered impressions and click through. If there are Keywords which have received few or no clicks and impressions, it is best to pause these keywords so you get the most out our daily spend.

Top Movers

Top Movers is a great tool helping you find out what works and what does not. The Top Movers tool will help you stay on top of your top performing campaigns by showing you the data about which Ad Groups and campaigns changed the most over a specific time period by comparing their performance to a different period.

Google made improvements to this feature earlier this year so now it can tell you if changes were consistent across various devices or not.

It will show you if a recent change you made had a positive or negative impact and whether or not that impact was the same or different for various user devices, but what it can’t do is show you how a competitor’s changes affected your campaigns.

Search Funnel

The clicks that count are the conversions, so knowing the path followed by those in your target market who actually made a purchase is critical. You can replicate what is working and abandon what isn’t. This tool maps out the route that lead to a conversion so you can see the entire process buyers followed.

Auction Insights Report

This isn’t a new report, but it is invaluable because it does show you how you fare against the competition. It produces five different statistics to show your average position in the rankings, how many of the possible times your ad appeared, how often a particular competitor’s ad appeared alongside yours and how often it outranked yours, and how often your ad was at the top of the page.

The effort you put into fine tuning your Google Adwords account and optimizing it will pay off. It will allow you to maximize the efforts that are rewarded and eliminate campaigns and keywords that aren’t leading to actual conversions.

Yes, it takes time to keep up with the shifting reactions.

Keywords and phrases change and evolve, and your competitors aren’t sitting still either. The time you invest in staying on top of the game will quickly translate into more conversions, which means more profit and less waste for your business.

If you would like one of our Adword experts to check over your Google Adwords account, please do get in touch. We would love to help you out.