In these days of digital marketing costs rising every month, cost is getting a more and more critical issue for online advertisers. In fact, the trend is to reduce online budgets.
As an online advertiser, you always aim to get the best results for less budget, and make your campaigns cost effective. In this post we will share with you some tips that will help you save money on your search campaigns.
1. Use Negative Keywords.
If your are using broad, modified broad or phrase match keywords, you absolutely need to make sure you are also using negative match. Using negative match will allow you to exclude irrelevant search terms that might get you clicks (that will cost you), but from the wrong reasons, and those users will not become a paying costumers.
For example, if you sell running shoes, and you have "shoes" as a phrase match. A user searching for [ballet shoes] will see your ads, and might click on them, but your website will be irrelevant for them since you don't actually sell what they are looking for. So, in order to avoid spending your budget on users who search for [ballet shoes] you can use "ballet" as a negative keyword (as a phrase or a broad negative), and avoid any searches related to ballet shoes.
2. Test The Use of Search Partners
When you create a search campaign in Google AdWords, the default settings will be to include search partners. But what are search partners?
Partners are other websites that use Google as their search engine on their website search box. For example, if the website - website.com has a search box in it, and it's a Google search partner, the search results you will see will be powered by Google.
The problem with search partners is that Google doesn't tell you who they are, and how they perform, so you can't really optimize it. But don't worry, there's still something you can do.
The first thing you can do is go to your account and click the segment button. In segment, filter by "Network (with search partner)". That will give you the results of Google.com vs the partners.
Now let's say the partners have good results in terms of conversions, but you don't really know the quality of those users. In order to test that, there's one simple thing you can do. Leave it open for a certain period, and then disable It for some time. Now you can compare the users you got from those two test periods, and see if there's any change in the quality of the users you get.
3. Be Careful with Match Types
Be extremely carful with your budget for broad and phrase match types. We're not saying you should use exact match only, but the broad and phrase can eat up your budget very quickly and not always in a good way.
So if you are using negative keywords as we suggested above, it will really help you not spending budget on useless search terms, but you should still pay attention to those keywords, since you will always find new search terms you will need to exclude.
4. Avg. Position 1 is not always the best for you.
A lot of search advertisers tend to focus on getting the highest possible avg. position and aiming towards #1. Being th first result on the SERP is NOT ALWAYS the best thing. A lot of times it will attract the wrong users who will just click the first thing they see. Add that to the fact that you will have to pay a higher CPC in order to be #1, you will usually lose money on those keywords. So unless it's your brand Keywords, being 2 -3 should be ok for you.
We hope this post helped you, and you are now ready to save money on AdWords and get a better ROI on your online spend.
