How To Run Google Ads Properly Without Wasting Budget

Are you running a Google Ads campaign and wasting your advertising budget? Here are our tips on running Google Ads campaigns so that you don’t end up wasting your advertising budget and don’t overspend on your Google Ads.

Set Clear Goals For Your Campaign First

To run a Google Ads campaign properly without wasting your advertising budget, you should always set clear goals for the campaign. To define what a successful campaign would or should look like, you need to know how much website traffic you would need, how many leads you require, and the conversion rate of those leads into sales.

Let’s Define What Success Looks Like:

Website Traffic

When establishing a Google Ads campaign, the amount of potential traffic is a key criterion. If your particular service has 500 searches per month, you can work on getting at least half of those searches to land on your website’s landing page when clicking through your Google Ad.

Leads

Leads are the number of people who click through to your website and either call in, email, or fill out a contact form. These leads get passed over to the sales team to close the deal.

To determine how many leads you should expect, you need to know the average conversion rate. An example of an average conversion rate for local businesses may be 5%-15%. If you get 250 clicks on your website and 10% convert, you can expect to try and close 25 sales per month. 

Sales

Following on from the number of expected leads, knowing how many sales you will need to close those deals to make the campaign worthwhile. 

To calculate your expected sales, you need to work off of this equation:

Sales = Clicks X Conversion Rate

Sales = 250 clicks X 10%

Sales = 25 sales for the month.

Once you have defined what success looks like, you can decide on which campaign type you can benefit the most from.  You have a few options: search, display, and performance max. This post will focus on search engine marketing for both the local service area ads and traditional search ads.

Local businesses with a Google Business Profile will benefit the most from local service ads and traditional search ads. If it makes sense to use both, you should use both methods. You will have to be mindful of your budget allocation, which is the next point.

Start With A Conservative Daily Budget, Don’t Go Crazy

When you start your Google Ads campaign, start with a conservative budget and scale as you improve your metrics. You begin with a lower budget while you test your campaign’s performance.

If you start with $10-$50 per day, you can test landing pages, improve conversions, improve your CPC, and ROAS before scaling your ads.

As you start gaining traction on your campaign and improve the Return On Ad Spend, you can increase the budget to gain the website traffic you require.

Use Targeted Keywords (Not Broad Match Only)

Another great tip so that you are not wasting your Google Ads budget is to only use targeted keywords in the beginning. Using exact match or phrase match keywords offers more control because you are targeting the people who are searching with a specific intent. Search intent should be local and commercial keywords. 

When you start with your campaign, avoid using only broad match keywords and queries. These terms attract many irrelevant clicks, which waste your ad budget.

You also want to regularly review the search terms report and add as many negative keywords to your ad campaign. These negative keywords may be words like cheap and free. In other words, if you have cheap plumbing services, and cheap is a negative keyword, the ad won’t show.

Improve Google Ads Quality Score

An often overlooked metric when running a Google Ads Campaign is the quality score. The higher the quality score is, the lower the CPC will be and the better the ad placement.

There are three things to focus on when improving your quality score:

1. Ad Copy Relevance – the ad copy has to be relevant to the query. If someone is searching for curtains in Phoenix, AZ, the ad copy should talk about the curtains you sell in Phoenix, AZ. The copy should be 100% relevant to the query and the landing page.
2. Always Use Strong Keywords On Your Landing Page – Following on from ad copy relevance, you need to focus on the keyword usage on the landing page. The keywords need to be scattered on the landing page. You may benefit from having the keywords placed in the H1, H2, and scattered throughout the paragraphs. It would also be wise to use variations of these keywords to improve relevance. An example of a variation may be Attorney Phoenix and Phoenix Lawyer. Also, always ensure all the text content is relevant to the ad campaign.
3. Having A High Click-Through Rate (CTR) – Having a high click-through rate improves the overall quality score of your campaign. Popular methods of improving your CTR include improving the Ad position in Google, having a strong call-to-action, and a compelling headline. If you tweak these 3 things, you should see an increase in your CTR.

Use Geo-Targeting To Stop Wasting Your Google Ads Budget

The next tip is to always geo-target your audience. If you are a local business, you would only want to service your clients in the local area. Targeting relevant regions or surrounding areas will certainly waste your advertising budget.

Our recommendation is to target areas within your desired location and perhaps a 10-mile radius around your location. For example, if you are located in the center of Phoenix, you may want to target your ads in Phoenix, Scottsdale, and Tempe.

Schedule Your Ads When You Are Open

When running Google Ads, it is best to run your ads when your audience is likely to convert. An example of this would be running ads during your office hours (9:00-17:00). There are times when you may want to run the ads 24 hours a day. An example of this may be for a 24-hour emergency plumber.

You don’t want to be running ads overnight if your staff aren’t able to respond to the call or enquiry. This leads to wasted budget, no conversions, and can hurt the overall image of your company.

Schedule your ads when you are open.

A/B Test Your Ads

Always be testing your ads. Running multiple ad variations to see what performs the best is a great way to improve your ROAS, reduce your bounce rate, and improve your CPA or CVR.

A/B testing is an often-overlooked strategy in improving your Google Ad campaigns. The idea is to test headlines, descriptions, call-to-actions, and landing pages to see what performs the best. 

The most common metrics to track are the following:

• Click-through rate (CTR)
• Conversion Rate (CVR)
• Cost Per Conversion (CPA)
• Quality Score (This has an indirect impact)
• Return on Ad Spend (ROAS)
• Bounce Rate

Use Conversion Tracking To Track The Best Performers

When running a Google Ad campaign, you should always be running conversion tracking. You should be measuring and tracking conversions for each ad and improving your conversion metrics. 

The first step is to set up conversion actions in Google Ads or just import them from Google Analytics. The key is to not worry about vanity metrics but focus on what is driving the actual results of the campaign. Clicks are great, but you need to convert them. If you can’t track how many are converting, you are flying blind.

Monitor and Optimize Your Google Ads Campaign Regularly

When running a Google Ads campaign, you should be monitoring and optimizing your campaign regularly. At the very least, you should be reviewing your campaign’s performance weekly, but certainly more often than that. You should pause underperforming ads or keywords and reinvest that budget into your top-performing campaigns.

Optimization improvements to your campaigns may mean more A/B testing, trying to improve metrics such as CTR, or improving your CPC.

6 Quick Tips – Avoid These Budget-Wasting Mistakes

• Don’t send traffic to a slow or irrelevant landing page. This will increase your bounce rate.
• Always use negative keywords. As many as you can. This stops irrelevant clicks from landing on your landing page and bouncing.
• Don’t change your budget too frequently. Only adjust the budget in increments as you improve your conversion metrics like Conversions, CPC, and ROAS.
• Don’t let your campaigns run on autopilot for too long. Consistently monitor and make improvements where necessary.
• We don’t advise our clients to ever use smart bidding or smart campaigns.

Conclusion

There are many ways to improve your Google Ads campaign and not waste your advertising budget. While setting up your first ads can seem straightforward, professional ad campaign management is what separates a high-ROI strategy from a wasted budget.

If you need help with your marketing or would like to learn about our Digital Marketing Services, contact us today.