In the following article, I will present you with a few tricks, which will allow you to control the budget of campaigns on the one hand, and on the other hand, with great probability, will improve their effectiveness. First, I will warn you – there is no magic way to save money – all the practices presented here require work and data analysis in a continuous and reliable way. In other words, budget reduction is consistent optimization and observation of results.
Basic campaign settings
Cheaper, because more accurate – so in a few words you can describe saving in the context of basic settings in Google Ads. Whether you run a local business or a nationwide e-commerce, you must know the basic parameters of the campaign you will be creating at the very beginning. This means that you should be able to specify the location where your ads will be displayed, the language of the users who are your target audience, as well as the days and hours when your ads are most desired. Without knowing where, who and when you want to reach, setting these parameters will be like letting go of the girl in the dark.
Location
When setting up the initial location settings, you need to rely on your intentions and answer the question – whether your client can afford to display ads to users in a location other than the one indicated by him. If you want to ensure the comfort of issuing ads in your chosen location, you must remember to set the so-called “second dot” in the Google Ads location settings, i.e.: Users located in the locations you have indicated or frequent visitors to them. Such configuration will save you the surprise that appears at the Google's recommended setting.'People located in selected locations or interested in them (recommended)', when suddenly it turns out that the mechanic from Białystok displays advertisements in Wrocław.
There are pluses and minus the choice of the so-called second dot immediately when creating the first campaign for a given business. The unquestionable advantage of such a decision is certainly savings. The disadvantage is that not exploiting the potential of views makes it impossible to explore the interest in a product or service in places other than those declared.
Language
As with the location, going to the issue of advertising in many languages can generate unnecessary costs. If your client's company does not have a crew communicating in English, or your client does not have a language version of the website, displaying ads for this language group (a custom recommended by Google) may be problematic for your client and consequently for you, because “who set it up?”.
Schedule
When the Google Ads campaign collects enough data, it is worth considering it in terms of hours and days of the week. For hours and days of the week, where we notice clicks without conversion, it is worth reducing the rates by up to -80%, so that the CPC for less valuable clicks is cheaper. Given that “competition never sleeps”, being deprived of the full option to show advertising and adjust rates -100%, e.g. at certain times is not a good practice. On the occasion of the adjustment of rates, we should also not forget to raise them for the hours in which conversions occur in order to increase the efficiency of our actions.
It is also worth noting that in business strongly based on conversions from telephone calls, the issue of advertising only during office hours will be a great savings.
Keywords and the cost of clicking
Matching keywords
The first rule is, if you do not have a high advertising budget, avoid a broad matching of keywords. Approximate matching is a type of match that will easily generate traffic on the page while not generating conversion.
Rule two – don't use general phrases. Conversion factor in their case will often be low and clicks expensive due to the fact that competition for general phrases is simply large. Besides, users using general phrases are usually only at the very beginning of the purchasing path – they carry with the intention of buying, but the way to finalize it is still far away.
So, to save on keywords, make accurate reeasers, using tools such as senuto, semstorm, answerthepublic.com, or classically with a keyword planner. When selecting keywords, follow the second rule – do not choose general phrases like “fridge” or “washing machine”. Such keywords will not bring you conversion. Search for precise alternatives and try to find people who already know something about the product they are looking for, e.g. the “beco automatic washing machine loaded from above”, will be a much cheaper option than the aforementioned “washing machine”.
Keyword exclusions
Using a campaign with more than strict matches, i.e. close-up matches, expressions or modifiers, before launching the campaign, take care of a list of non-key words. You can create this list already when planning the keywords for the campaign, because if the store for which you are creating the campaign does not have in the assortment of Beko washing machines, it is worth excluding this manufacturer and the phrases associated with it.
Also use the exclusion letters available online. Letters with profanity, cities or names are available in groups on Facebook, as well as in marketing agencies websites or freelancers dealing with the daily campaign of Google Ads. It is also a good practice to create your own lists of words excluding them from a thematic grouping.
Excluding non-business keywords is one of the better ways to save money in the campaign, and not just at the beginning. Regular verification of the section “Searched Words” and exclusion of inadequate phrases is a simple way to reduce campaign costs in the future.
Profitability of keywords
Verification of the profitability of keywords is possible only if we measure conversions on the page correctly. In order to assess profitability, we must therefore be included in the conversion calculation in Google Ads and/or in Google Analytics. Knowing the value of the individual keywords, we can group the keywords after the coming that they generate for us, excluding those that bring losses. Such a monthly practice (when the data is updated enough) allows us to catch keywords with a high profitability. Such words should be moved to a separate group of advertisements (the SKAGs technique, which we write about a little later) and create preferred advertisements and extensions for them, in order to even better expose valuable phrases from the perspective of a given business.
Quality result – what is and what is made of it?
Google Ads' quality score is an evaluation of ads, keywords and target page that can help reduce advertising costs and increase the chance to show it to a better position in Google. The quality result shall consist of the following components:
- Predicted coefficient of cliqueness, i.e. an assessment of how likely it is to click by the user after displaying a given keyword in isolation from extensions or advertising positions that affect the probability of clicking,
- The accuracy of advertising, or the degree to which the keyword is matched to the text of the advertisement.
- Quality of the target page, i.e. an assessment of the extent to which the landing party of the advertisement corresponds to the advertising and the key word. What practice means is whether the keywords used in advertising and queries correspond to the content on the website. The speed of its operation will also be an element affecting the evaluation of the quality of the target page.
Quality score 10/10 – how to get it to start saving?
The 10/10 quality result is largely dependent on the structure of our campaign. Therefore, in order to obtain such a result, it is necessary to:
- Precisely group keywords.
- In the advertising texts present in a given advertising group, they contain keywords present in it.
- The landing page of the advertisement is directed so that the key phrases used in the campaign and in the advertisements are on it.
Another, although similar way to create a 10/10 quality advertising group is to use 1 keyword for a group of advertisements, in which the ads appear closely matched to the selected word, and on the landing page of the ads, of course, there is a phrase indicated by us. Such a technique is called SKAGS, or Single Keywords Ad Groups.
Machine Learnings – Good practice of limited trust
Smart learning systems are modern must have every online marketer. Although they use millions of signals and are highly recommended by Google, they do not always guarantee profitability in the context of the sale of services or products. High CTRs and numerous clicks do not always translate into conversion.
Before deciding to switch to an automatic rate setting strategy, it is always worth doing A/B tests through Google Ads, and also considering choosing a strategy to correspond with our goal. The duration of such a test should include at least one month of campaign work and be kept under constant observation. In addition, with low budget expenditure, it may sometimes be impossible to launch campaigns based on, for example, the CPA target without increasing the resources in this campaign. Therefore, it is better at the beginning of the new campaign to carry out manual optimization on the basis of the CPC than to use smart strategies immediately.
In summary, below you will find a list of tricks to reduce costs in the Google Ads campaign. Of course, the list below does not cover all the possibilities, but it can inspire further “cut” costs in campaigns:
Basic campaign settings:
- enable “second dot” in advanced location settings,
- enable language settings only for languages that are actually supported in the company,
- analysis of the schedule of advertising display and reduction of rates for less effective hours/days of the week,
- devices – lower rates for non-generating lead/sale devices.
Keywords
- using general phrases generates movement, but can also contribute to non-refundable spending, so if you choose to use them, carefully observe their effectiveness,
- using an approximate match requires conscientious exclusion of business-related phrases, in case of omissions the budget loss will be almost certain.
Quality result
- Take care to evaluate keywords, ads and target pages in the context of quality result to save.
Automatic rate-setting strategies
- In order to maximise the potential of automatic rates-setting strategies, it is worth conducting experiments that will allow us to choose the optimal strategy for a particular business.
