How to reduce your Google Ads costs by 20% without affecting performance
There is so much wastage in Google Ads campaigns today. The current research shows that 40% of all Google Ads spend is just a complete waste of money. The problem is that most businesses don’t know which 40% or what to do with it. It’s getting worse, not better too. So, it’s time to find out how to minimise wastage to maximise returns.
Find and eliminate the wastage!
Firstly, we need to understand the root cause of why so much money is being wasted – and it boils down to two core factors:
- All recent changes by Google over the past 12-18 months have created more waste than ever before.
- Poor management of campaigns due to laziness or not having the expertise needed.
How to find quick wins: 20% reduce in costs without affecting performance.
Now that we know where the wastage is coming from, let’s dive into how you can reduce your Google costs by 20% in a manner of weeks without affecting performance, outcomes, leads and revenue to your business.
1. Turn off display and search partners
Display and search partners have never (and as far as I can tell, will never), produce the acceptable returns that core search does. They are very much brand building channels, so if you’ve got big pockets and just want to get your name out there, it’s worthwhile, but for all SME’s, it’s not a good use of money.
2. Manage your brand terms stringently
Your brand terms need to be in their own campaign where you manually bid on them around $0.20 – $0.30, and you negate them from the other campaigns especially the likes of Performance Max (PMax). It’s your brand, Google knows that, so it should be super cheap. All too often we see the likes of $2, $5, and $10 per click on your brand keywords. That is an absolute waste of money that is going straight to Google’s bottom line and not yours.
Important note: You need to manually control the bids on your brand terms – don’t ever have auto-bidding set up on your brand terms.
3. Interrogate your search queries
One of the most important components of Google Ads optimisation is to review and analyse your search query. It shows you how effective Google is matching your keywords to what is typed into the search box. But it also shows you the irrelevant search terms that you need to add as negatives so that your ad never shows for those keywords again.
4. Use exact match with a bit of phrase match – never broad match!
Google relaxed the match types in late 2022 with detrimental results to nearly every advertiser, but to great improvements in Google’s bottom line. To ensure good results and minimise wastage you should now only use exact match keywords with a little bit of phrase for core terms or to test and trial keywords. NEVER, EVER use broad match!
5. Analyse and improve your quality score
Ultimately Google Ads costs per click is determined by two things – your bid and quality score. The higher the quality score, the lower the bid you will need. So, focusing on ensuring you have a high-quality score for every keyword becomes really important.
Ultimately there are only two core things you can do to improve:
- Write more engaging ads.
- Improve user journey with a better landing page.
6. Switch off PMax
PMax, Google’s new fandangle advertising secret weapon, produces substandard results and should only be used sparingly. It’s in Google’s interests to drive profit, not in your interests to maximise returns on ad spend. You can read more about this here.
7. Turn off auto-bidding
All auto bidding does is drive up bids, it actually automatically increases your bids while you sleep. So, turn it off! Yes, there is some extra work in manually bidding, but it also means you control and consciously decide when you want to bid more, and you can cut bids when you want. I’ve never seen an auto-bidding reduce bids!
There you have it – seven steps that will get you on your way to reducing your Google Ads costs by 20% without affecting performance. Need more help with maximising your Google Ads? Call us today on 1300 628 086.
