Paid marketing on Google Ads is a lucrative strategy with the power to connect your business, products, and services with millions of users every day. While many marketers find great success on Google Ads, there are some cases where the users don’t find that happy ending with their PPC campaigns as Google Ads cost them too much.
The problem facing these unsuccessful marketers typically boils down to budgeting. If you aren’t optimizing your strategies by thinking about key metrics like wasted spend, cost per acquisition (CPA) and time dimension, then it can be costly. You will be at high risk for driving clicks but not conversions or showing your ads to the wrong audiences.
Wasted spend is bad news, no matter what the reason.
In this discussion, we’ll explore how to optimize your google advertising budget for these three key pillars: wasted spend, CPA and time.
Waste is always negative, especially when it comes to money. You have a limited amount of dollars in your marketing budget. Thus, wasting even a few dollars can hurt your overall success and cause you to potentially miss out on huge opportunities in the ad market.
Wasted spend is at the core of optimizing your PPC budget. You should always be striving to maximize your results, while simultaneously lowering your google advertising costs. The less money you spend for the same results, the better your budget is being utilized. In this way, your Google Ads cost will remain in control.
It’s common for advertisers to waste their budget because they don’t work towards keeping ad costs low and results high. There are a number of factors that will negatively impact your budget.
Every campaign you produce needs to be guided by a goal or objective. This will help keep your strategies on target, especially your selection of keywords.
There are two ways to approach this factor:
Once you’ve acquired the basic framework of your content and keywords, your campaign goal will help you narrow the list down to a more specific selection of search terms to target.
In other words, your goal will inform your content strategy and keyword research.
A common strategy to ensure alignment between campaign goal and keyword selection is Dynamic Keyword Insertion (DKI). This tool is designed to dynamically place keywords in your ad copy based on what an individual search user has looked for. Not only does this guarantee higher ad relevance, but it means that you can create one, generic ad for multiple keywords.
For example, if you have keywords like men jeans, striped jeans, best men jeans, etc, then DKI will customize your ad content each time someone searches for one of these terms and many other keyword strains that share the same types of words.
DKI is a great way to increase clicks and make your ads appear more relevant, but it can be costly if you aren’t able to turn those clicks into conversions! You can also add keywords in your landing page dynamically to meet your audience’s intent closely and finally lead them for conversion.
With your keywords properly aligned to the campaign goal, you’re able to create engaging ad copy that drives search users to click and visit your website. However, there is still a significant obstacle in your way: putting those messages in front of the right users and at a precise time.
If users don’t see your ads when they are actually interested in such offers, then you’re missing out on a key opportunity. Similarly, if you only place ads when users are not interested in converting, you may generate clicks but no revenue, thereby wasting your marketing budget.
So, how do you position your ads to appear in front of the right audiences and at the right time? It’s all about targeting. A targeted strategy looks at a variety of audience details to determine the best times and places to engage with these prospective customers.
Some of the key methods in a targeted marketing strategy are detailed below:
Naturally, your ad copy is another important component of successful PPC marketing and budget optimization to keep control on your Google advertising cost. Exceptional ad copy can lower your cost-per-click amounts, which means you’ll have a lower cost of ads on Google. At the same time, poor ad copy can lead to more expensive advertising.
There’s no perfect recipe for great ad copy that will work every time. That said, there are some tips that can help you develop consistently stronger ad messages.
Bids are directly connected to your costs. With the wrong bidding strategy in place, it can be easy to waste your money instead of make money. Since Google offers several uniquely different bidding strategies, having the wrong one in place for your campaigns is easier than you think.
Every bid strategy is focused on a different type of campaign goal. If you are hoping to drive clicks, there is a bidding strategy for that. If you want to focus on conversions, there is a bidding strategy designed to maximize this performance metric.
Here are common goals and the type of bidding strategy best suited for each:
The Pareto Principle is a marketing theory that states that 80% of your results will come from only 20% of your activities. In other words, you have a small minority of critical keywords, ad copy, campaigns, etc. that produce the majority of your results.
It’s common for marketers to want to focus on everything, but there is rarely enough time in the day to take care of every possible opportunity or available avenue. The best route for optimizing your campaigns and lowering the cost of ads on Google is to focus your efforts and budget towards these critical few tasks.
These are the components of your Google Ads account that will produce the strongest return on investment (ROI). By focusing your efforts on this select group of tasks, you’ll not only stretch your budget further, but you will also spend your time more wisely.
The key to controlling the cost of ads on Google is to audit your account(s) and campaigns frequently. The purpose of a PPC audit is to dig into your account and find the specific areas that need improvement. When you make auditing your Google Ads account a routine task, it becomes almost automatic to discover areas that are potentially costing you money.
If you’ve never conducted a PPC audit before, here is a few checklists of metrics and account components to check.
Have a try on PPCexpo Reporting Tool and have a full and complete audit of your campaigns and account.
Your PPC campaigns create a lot of data. This can make managing your Google Ads account for a statistical nightmare. You have a lot of important metrics that are constantly changing. These minor shifts can be reflective of significant trends that can lead to valuable opportunities or potentially harmful risks.
With the right analysis tool, monitoring the changes in your PPC data will be much easier. You’ll be able to identify these important trends and patterns and make the right decisions on how to proceed.
These types of data-driven decisions are much more accurate than acting on gut-feelings. The more accurate your decision-making strategies, the better your optimization, and overall ROI. This can even help you gain an important edge in the competition.
Google has your best interests at heart, but not every default setting or recommendation they make is as helpful as it may seem on paper. In fact, some of their default settings can actually increase the cost of ads on Google.
Here are a few options to watch out for:
Your cost per acquisition is how much of your marketing or ad budget is spent to acquire a single new customer or conversion. It is also sometimes referred to as cost per action. The lower your cost per acquisition, the higher your potential ROI, which makes it a very important element of the cost of ads on Google.
It is much easier to control costs than it is to acquire more customers. Thus, starting with lowering your CPA can be a great, initial strategy for optimizing your PPC budget. There are a number of steps you can take to reduce your marketing and conversion costs.
The most obvious way to lower your CPA is to focus on converting at a higher rate. The fewer clicks you have to pay before someone converts, the lower your costs. To higher your conversion rate, you need to look at a wide range of factors. At the top of the list are your landing pages.
Landing pages are often the last step in the process. You’ve paid for the click, which means your ad copy has done its job. Now, it is up to the landing page to seal the deal and complete the conversion!
Try and make the process as easy as possible for customers. Don’t overload them with additional offers or extra materials. Instead, give them what they came for and make it easy to find any additional information they need to make their decision.
Conversion rates can also be improved through the use of retargeting campaigns. As you learned in the previous part of this discussion, retargeting is focused on bringing past visitors back to your account. These individuals are more likely to convert, which means there is a good chance you’ll have higher conversion rates with these campaigns.
As you’re improving your conversion rates, try and detect any on-site obstacles that are getting in the way of your conversions. While this can again be a problem with your landing pages, it can also be a result of a clunky checkout process, slow page load times, poor mobile optimization or other issues.
Start by A/B split testing different landing pages to see if there are any ways to improve the experience to drive more conversions. Also, pay attention to what links people click from your landing pages. This can help you better understand what sort of content and questions they need answered before converting.
You should also look at cart abandonment rates and checkout data to see if there are any points where a lot of customers quit the transaction. There may be something you can do to remove the friction in this key step.
Also, measure page load speeds and check that everything loads smoothly. This is an especially important step if you have a lot of mobile customers. Users on smartphones and other mobile devices will not wait for slow page loads! Speeding up load times can be a simple matter of removing complex elements on the page.
There are smart bidding options that directly relate to CPA. The Target CPA bidding strategy gives the marketer the option to enter a target CPA amount. This value is the maximum that Google will spend on acquiring a conversion. It’s a great bidding strategy if you are on a tight budget and need to be very careful with your spending.
There are also target ROAS (return on ad spend) and other bidding options to take a look at. With automated bidding, you can save time and man hours, which is another way to save on costs that Google doesn’t account for. By investing in marketing automation tools and features, like smart bidding, you can get more done with less staff. You can learn more about should you use smart bidding in Google Ads?
You want to align your products and services to be the best possible solution to the needs of target consumers. This is how you stand out from the competition! Sometimes, the best change that you can make to your PPC campaigns is not a matter of targeting, bidding, or otherwise, but simply offering more value to customers.
Value can be created in many different ways. It could be an added feature or quality in your products that competitors don’t offer. It can also be something as simple as a return policy or loyalty program. The more proposed value that a customer sees from making a purchase with your company, the better the offer appears.
To find out what sort of value customers are looking for, pay attention to review data and social media comments. People have no problem letting companies know what they’ve done right and wrong. If you can find some common problems and position your products as the answer, it can be a tremendous boost to your conversions.
You may be overpaying for keyword clicks without realizing it! A good strategy is to run an experiment on lowering your keyword bids and seeing how it affects your ad ranks, CTR, and conversion rates. If you don’t see much of a change, then this is a phenomenal way to lower your cost per acquisition. And, if there is a dip in performance, you can simply increase bids back to their normal levels.
This can also be a good way to find keywords that are actually not leading to conversions. Instead, they are wasting your ad budget by generating clicks from prospects that aren’t interested in taking action.
In the past section, we touched on Quality Scores as an important stop during a PPC audit. The importance of these ratings that Google assigns to your keywords, ad groups, and campaigns cannot be overstated.
The reason why Google grades ads by relevance, quality, and other factors are because they want to put the best possible messages in front of their search users. For this reason, Google actually lowers CPC amounts for ads with very high-quality ratings. If you work towards improving your Google Quality Scores, then you are also working towards lowering your costs!
Here are a few tips to think about when improving Quality Scores:
Time is an important element in anything your business does. After all, time is money! Optimizing your campaigns and your PPC budget takes time and effort. You have to analyze several different areas of your campaigns to determine where your budget is being spent wisely and where it is being wasted.
If your Google Ads account is small, then managing these various elements is not that challenging or time-consuming. However, as your account grows and you begin scaling your efforts to include more and more keywords, manually managing campaigns becomes almost impossible to do efficiently.
For example, if you have 10 different campaigns and each campaign has 1,000+ keywords, then suddenly you have a massive Google Ads account to manage. All of these keywords are changing all the time and staying ahead of these shifts is important for developing stronger campaigns and better performance.
If you have a large Google Ads account, then you need a tool like PPC Signal.
PPC Signal is an extremely helpful campaign management tool that monitors changes in Google advertising data and automatically alerts the account owner of noteworthy trends, patterns, shifts, outliers and other events happening in their campaigns.
It is powered by sophisticated machine learning algorithms that measure not only the current performance of campaigns but also their historical performance to find interesting correlations in your data. Because PPC Signal only analyzes your own Google Ads account data, all of the insights that it finds are uniquely relevant to your campaigns.
You can also filter the alerts that PPC Signal provides based on the areas of your campaign that you want to focus on. For instance, you can filter your alerts based on risks and opportunities affecting your conversion rates. This makes it easy to find the factors affecting your budget and ROI!
PPC marketing is not a once-in-awhile task, but rather a continuous process that requires constant attention. Your PPC metrics are always changing, which means you need a 24/7 lookout to catch the noteworthy shifts. That’s the core purpose behind PPC Signal.
By automating the detection of potential opportunities and risks, marketers can focus all of their attention towards making positive changes. You no longer have to spend hours of your time manually digging through data for possible areas of interest.
When you can commit all of your time and energy towards making improvements, you can make it a daily part of your routine. Improving just 1% each day can grow into an amazing boost in ROI by the end of the year, as much as 365%.
The average cost per click in Google Ads is between $1 and $2 on the Search Network. The average CPC on the Display Network is under $1. Depending on the business domain, the cost of keyword may go beyond 50$ as well
In 2022, the average Google advertising cost per click is expected to remain between $1 to $2 on the Google Search network. Some niches have lower cost and some have higher cost.
Of course it worth. Google Ads are worth it because they provide a profitable way for businesses of all sizes to reach a virtually unlimited, targeted audience. They’re extremely supple and you can start, stop, pause, or even adjust your bids at any time.
Yes, you can cancel your Google Ads account at any time. Once you cancel, it will automatically stop all your ads within 24 hours.
One reason your Google advertising have gotten so expensive is because of wrong timing or you are not optimizing campaigns properly. You can have complete audit of your campaigns to check where issues are coming and where you can bring improvements.
Tip: Start small. If you’re a beginner, try an average daily budget of US$12 to US$50. Check your reports daily after applying a new budget to see how your campaigns have performed. For same clients, you can set a shared budget with the amount you’re willing to spend across multiple campaigns.
When it comes to keeping the cost of ads on Google at a minimum, it’s all about optimizing your budget. With this three-step approach to lowering the cost of ads on Google, you’ll maximize your performance for your budget.
Start by removing any areas where your ad spend is being wasted (keywords, device types, locations, etc). Next, work towards lowering your cost per acquisition by improving Quality Scores, adjusting keyword bids, and increasing conversion rates.
Finally, invest in automation tools like PPC Signal that can help you commit your time to improve accounts, instead of monitoring changes in metrics.
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