I don’t know if it’s just me, but it feels like Adwords is getting a bit pricey nowadays. Keywords are getting more expensive by the month and depending on the industry you work in, some keywords are just plain insulting.
$60.00+ per click? Really?
But there’s no use crying about it, this is the way it is. When Google runs the internet, they can charge what they want and it’s the price we pay for having unprecedented levels of analytical control over our ads.
In light of this, we don’t need to completely suffer at the hand of our search engine overlord. There are many things that you can do to tweak your Adwords campaign in order to reduce your cost per click and reduce wasteful clicks all together.
Let’s get into it.
Get Negative
This is one of the rare times in life where seeing the glass half empty is actually the optimistic approach. ‘Negative Keywords’ are keywords that exclude your ads from certain searches. For example, say your company sells gardening services in Perth. One of your keywords may be “gardening”. However, not everyone who searches “gardening” is looking for gardening services. For example, someone may perform a search for “gardening hobby” instead. Now the person searching for hobby reasons is not someone you want clicking your ad and wasting your money, which is why Negative Keywords exist.
Aside from brainstorming potential Negative Keywords, you can also click the “Keyword Planner” tab on Adwords, then search for your ‘main keyword’ (‘gardening’ in this case) and see what comes up. Once you see what is being searched, find what isn’t relevant to your campaign and then add it to your ‘Negative Keywords’ tab
You’re Burning Leads With Bad Landing Pages
I don’t think an Adwords ad has ever once converted a lead just by itself. That’s because the true power of an Adwords ad is in the landing page (or website) that it’s linked to. With a bad, mediocre or irrelevant page, the lead will just go elsewhere after clicking and leave you with the bill.
We could go on forever about what makes a good landing page, but most importantly it needs to communicate directly to the search term in question. For example, if someone searches “Perth wedding gown drycleaning services”, the landing page needs to actually talk about wedding gown drycleaning services in Perth. It should not talk about:
· How to dryclean your clothes
· The benefits of drycleaning
· Drycleaning vs washing machine cleaning
Now it’s not the worst thing in the world if your landing page mentions one of the above topics within it, but it must be relevant to the search term first and foremost. Otherwise people will click the ad, think “this isn’t what I searched for” and then go somewhere else
Broader Isn’t Always Better
This goes somewhat into the last point, but ‘Broad match Keywords’ can attract the wrong kinds of visitors to your ads.
Broad match Keywords are ones that make your show up to a range of keywords that are similar to the original keyword. For example the keyword “coffee” can include “coffee cups”, “coffee detox”, “instant coffee alternatives” and the like.
While they can be helpful, they need to be complemented with intensive negative Keyword research to keep them from getting too irrelevant. Use with caution, or even avoid them for a while and see if it makes a positive impact.
Time Is Money
Your ads cost different amounts depending on which day it is and what time of the day it is. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing to pay more at certain times, but only if it is producing good results.
If you’re seeing a bunch of click-throughs on a Saturday evening, but none of them are converting to leads then it may tell you that the people who are looking at that time aren’t the type of people who are going to convert.
The solution would be to shut off the campaign during the time periods that are performing poorly and redistribute it to better-performing time slots.
Don’t Give Up
It’s easy to give up on Adwords nowadays, as it seems to be getting only more expensive and pricing out small businesses. But don’t give up on Adwords just yet. There is still plenty that can be gained from Adwords and you can undoubtedly make it work for you.
You might just need to tweak things a little!
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