Every brand wants to achieve perfect ranking in search results, but most fail to do so, due to inexperience or running random campaigns without clear goals and experience in Google Advertising. 

There’s a cold war between competitors about ranking on the top search engine result pages SERPs, due to its value. To outperform competitors, you need continuous work on creating and improving valuable content for months, without getting tired or bored.

The good news about Google advertising is its offering of a top space in search engine results for paid content. As it takes less time to appear, but for a material fee. Consequently, the fee may be large or small depending on the advertiser’s experience and skill in reducing the cost. 

Most businesses have been affected and marketing budgets got shorten due to the occurrence of COVID-19. Therefore, it’s highly important that you get as many leads as possible by reducing the cost per lead.

In this article, we’ll go over some strategies that can help you get the best value for your budget.

4 Effective Ways to Reduce Your Google Advertising Budget

1. Limit the Google Advertising Budget

If you don’t have unlimited spending available, then you’re probably blowing a big chunk of your daily budget on expensive clicks, and leaving cheaper clicks at lower ad positions.

Check the “Search Impression Lost (Budget)” column in your Ads reports to see how ‘Limited By Budget’ your campaign is. If you can afford more ad spend, then you could increase the budget. If not, try to decrease bids by a small amount and see how it goes for a couple of weeks. This may seem counter-intuitive but getting more cheap clicks is better than getting fewer expensive ones.

You can continue decreasing the bids like this until the ‘Limited By Budget warning’ goes away. Or till the campaign clicks decrease again, which means that they’ve gone too low now.

2. Review the Quality Scores of Your Keywords

The higher your Quality Score is for any keyword, the less you will have to pay to appear in any given ad position – i.e. Google will give you a discount and a competitive advantage.

Quality Score Components = Ad Relevance + Landing Page Experience + Expected CTR. The more you can improve these components, the higher the Quality Score of your campaign will be, and the less you will pay per click.

Ad Relevance:

Ensure that for all the major keywords in each ad group, that you have at least one ad that includes that keyword phrase (or something very close) in the ad headlines.

Landing Page Experience – remember the following:

Relevance and Originality:

The page should contain only original content, not copied from other websites. Be of high value to the user given the keywords they searched for and contain the main targeted keywords in the title tag and high up in the body copy.

Navigation:

The page should make it easy for the visitor to navigate your site (including on mobile).

Transparency and Trustworthiness:

The page should explain your products/services before asking visitors to fill out forms or share their information.

Load Time:

Encourage customers to spend time on your site by ensuring your page loads quickly.

Expected CTR:

This is the click-through rate that Google expects your ads to get for that keyword in that ad position and is based on your ads’ past performance. To keep this high rate, only bid on keywords that are highly relevant to your market and write an attractive and action-motivating ad copy.

If you do not have time for a full review of your account’s Quality Scores, at least look for Rarely Shown Due to Low-Quality Score warnings on any keywords. It is best to pause keywords with this warning as they may harm the account. The exception would be if it is converting well at a good cost per lead despite the low score.

3. Add Positive and Negative Keywords

Review the Search Terms Report (STR) – these are the actual search terms your ads showed for, based on your keywords.

Review the Search Terms Report STR, ad group by ad group, looking for these kinds of search terms:‍

‍Good: High CTR (Click-Through Rate) and low Cost Per Conversion – add these search terms as new Keywords.

Bad: Irrelevant terms and very low CTR / high Cost Per Conversion – add these search terms as Negative Keywords. 

For Negative Keywords, think about whether to add them at the ad group or campaign level – make sure you do not exclude things you want to show for in other ad groups. When judging CTR / Cost Per Conversion, the data needs to be statistically significant, so only look at search terms with 100-300 impressions minimum.

4. Improving Campaigns

Account optimization is all about one key concept in Google advertising marketing – finding the ‘winners’ in your account and boosting them and finding the ‘losers’ and dropping them.

Winners are the things that generate leads/conversions at a low cost per lead, and losers are the ones that have a high cost per lead (or do not convert at all). For this reason, it is worth investing more of your budget in the winners and less (or nothing) in the losers.

This is done via bid adjustments, which can be applied to a wide range of things in your account. Here are some examples – things that can be identified as winners or losers:

• Different ad groups within a campaign.
• Different Keywords within an ad group.
• Ad 1 vs Ad 2.
• Desktop vs mobile vs tablet.

• Location vs location.
• Times of Day and Day of Week.
• Audiences (Re-marketing etc.).
• Demographics – Age, Gender, Income.

Here is an example of how we would analyze the Google advertising data to adjust bids. Let’s look at device performance:

Analyze the data at the ad group or campaign level, and follow this process:

• Note down the benchmark CTR, cost per click, cost per conversion, and conversion rate over a decent time frame for all devices, and also for each segment (mobile, tablet, desktop). We will use these to determine how big our bid adjustments should be, and then to track “before and after” performance – including knowing whether any changes to mobile metrics are, in fact, just changes to ALL device metrics.

• Tick the box of the segment you want to adjust, and enter a positive or negative percentage, based on the performance of such segment. The bid adjustment percentage you use should be the percentage difference between “all devices” segment vs that specific device segment.
• In the example above, desktop computers have a far lower cost per conversion than the other devices, so we have applied a +25% adjustment. The mobile segment has a much higher cost per conversion, so we have applied a 20% adjustment.

Once applied, check the performance of the segments after two months, then further increase or decrease as required.

To conclude,

The past four strategies in Google Advertising should help lower your cost per lead over time, along with helping you squeeze more out of your marketing budget. However, if you have a question about any of the above, contact us. We have a team of professionals in providing advertising and digital marketing services.