You're using Google Ads and want to get the top results with the least cost? If yes, keep reading and learn some solid practices to optimise your ads so they don’t drain your budget. Anyway, if you want to save your time and effort, you can entrust the whole optimisation routine to an automated platform like RecommendMe. Let’s go through some strategies that you can put into action to cut down your marketing expenses.

1. Don’t Concentrate on High Bids

Paid search advertising works based on the principle of an auction. Let’s say you add high-volume keywords without limiting the maximum bid. In this case, you’re going to win the most auctions; however, the CPC will be high.

Want to know a secret? Unless you offer products or services of instant demand, like a taxi or emergency lock repair, having the top position in SERP doesn’t have to be your goal.

Instead, you can get good traffic at lower positions without overpaying for clicks. Just find out the minimal bid that is necessary to get into the top ad unit, and bid the figure right below that level.

Here’s an example that helps better understand what we mean. Let’s take a closer look at the current metrics for the key phrase ‘window screen repair near me’ in an active Google Ads campaign:

CTR — 6.42%
average cost-per-click — $2.54

Now, let’s check how much we’ll have to spend on a user's click in the top of search results with the same keyword. For this, we use Google Keyword Planner:

So, the minimum bid for one click in the top ad unit is $3.58 (it’s almost twice as high as in our current campaign).

Our current maximum bid won’t let us get into the top ad unit. However, the ad copy will still get traffic and we'll save money. It truly works, especially in case you’re on a tight budget.

2. Pay for Conversions

It’s wise to pay for clicks once you sell high margin products, and your ads have already proved to receive a high CTR. Also, a CPC strategy will pay off if you can figure out the number of conversions ahead.

However, if your business doesn’t reflect one or more of these parameters, the conversion cost can go higher than you want it. To save the budget, you can switch to pay for completed conversions, not clicks.

Keep in mind that you can take advantage of this payment mode only if you’re launching a Smart or Standard campaign on the Display Network. Just select "Pay for conversions" in the Bidding tab while you’re adjusting the settings for your campaign.

Yet, not every account is eligible for this type of payment. Why? Let us explain the reasons:

Your account features offline conversions, like store visits or ad clicks import. Remove them if you want to set up a campaign with paying for conversions.
Conversion data delay is more than seven days long. For instance, your customer clicked on the ad on 22 March but made a purchase only on 7 April.
Your business appears ineligible for this payment mode. In this case, you’ll just get an error notification. Google doesn’t explain the reasons why this happens. Anyway, things might change, and eventually, this function can become available.

3. Take Advantage of Device, Location and other Bid Adjustments

Needless to say that the traffic ROI in advertising campaigns depends upon a range of factors. The conversion costs will differ within different ad placements, locations, audiences, and devices.

Here's the advice: analyse the efficiency of your campaign relying upon the two parameters: the total amount of conversions and the cost you pay for each of them. It will let you make the right conclusions to further optimise your advertising budget. For example, you may decrease your bids for audiences or locations with poor performance, or just exclude them from targeting.

Want to see how it works? Let’s get down to it.

According to the data in the Device section, we find out that our business received 3 conversions from desktop devices and 2 conversions from mobiles. However, we’ve spent 10 times more cost on mobile advertisements.

It’s easy to understand that in this campaign, mobile ads drain your budget. What’s more, they don’t bring better results if compared to desktop ads. That’s why it’s reasonable to establish the bid for mobile devices for -40% at the beginning. After that, follow the progress of your campaign. If eventually, you don’t get expected conversions from mobiles, you can lower the bids by even more, or just switch off your mobile ads and focus your budget on desktops.

Here are all the possible bid adjustments in Google Ads as well as their ranges:

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4. Work Out the Keywords

When you use broad match keywords, it’s very likely that you draw much irrelevant traffic. So how can you manage your ad copies so that they match relevant queries? There are two approaches to handle it.

Go for exact match keywords

Exact keywords will help you draw more relevant traffic. Plus, you won't need to think of negative keywords. On the flip side, you risk considerably losing on the reach, mainly when you offer products/services belonging to narrow categories. To top it off, you spend more on traffic using exact match keywords if compared to a broad match.

Utilise negative keywords

Another strategy is to combine broad and exact match keywords, but you'll also have to elaborate negative keywords. This way of generating relevant traffic really works; however, it takes much of your time and attention.

It may sound disappointing, but it’s not enough to enter the list of keywords at the stage of setting up the campaign. That's difficult to forecast all the possible queries of the users that will drive irrelevant traffic. To leverage negative keywords, you'll have to constantly update them.

For this, as soon as you start running your campaign, remember to monitor irrelevant queries and negate them.

You can trace the queries in your account. Just go to the Keywords tab and select Search terms.

5. Manage Negative Words to Avoid Cross-Campaign Matches

If you run the same keywords for separate ad groups, there are high chances of the internal competition. To prevent it, you should use campaign-level negative keywords.

So how does the whole thing look like? For example, you’re running two ad groups within one campaign and use the following keywords:

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Each of the key phrases fires a different ad. Let’s say someone types in ‘puppy food buy’ into the search box. Basically, it's possible that the user will see an advert for ‘puppy food’, the basic information about it, like its types, feeding schedule, etc.

You have to set up negative words within your groups to help your ads get to the right users. It's a no-brainer that we need to manage our keywords so that people who look for ‘puppy food buy’ don't see the ad for ‘puppy food.’ For this, you should add the words like ‘buy’ to the list of negative words in ad group X.

6. Craft Quality Ads

Auction bid isn't the single parameter that affects the position of your ad copy. Beyond the bids, your ads quality, rating, location, device, and other factors influence the overall quality score.

If you take note of all these things, you’ll have higher chances to outperform your business competitors who made the same bids but run ads of worse quality than yours.

What is more, quality ads not only help you get to the highest positions but also generate more conversions. Let’s cut to the chase and have a look at the following ad examples:

The upper ad looks more attractive, right? That’s because it includes three headlines, a description with a solid CTA, quick links, and contact details. It’s noticeable, plus it has more helpful information for a potential customer.

In which ways can you boost the quality of your ads? We’ve prepared some helpful tips for you:

Utilise all the fields in your ads: include some headlines, clear descriptions, and a URL.
Take advantage of the extensions.
Check if the headlines include keywords.
The quality of your ad depends much on the landing page. Make sure that the landing page is relevant to the ad.

Remember to check whether the landing page is functioning. Sometimes pages are deleted and users see error 404 after they click on the advert. So stay in touch with the website developers and get information about any updates in time.
Take care of your content. Make it useful for your future customers. Provide detailed information on your product, mention your loyalty program, delivery and guarantee terms, etc.

Once you’re already running ad campaigns, make use of their statistics. Find out which ads help generate cheap conversions, analyse how they look like and what makes the users click. Modify your current advertisements so they look likewise and stick to this principle while creating new ads.

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7. Test the Ads

It’s hardly possible to estimate the performance of the ad before the campaign is launched and you start generating clicks. A word of advice: you can test several versions of ad copies to find out which of them shows a better CTR and drives more conversions.

We recommend creating at least two ad copies for each group when you start. When the campaign is launched, track the progress of each one, analyse their efficiency, and finally, keep the ones that perform best.

8. Go For Keywords that Reflect a Clear Intent

If you wish to maximise your advertising cost, it’s a great solution to concentrate on the traffic that generates sales. How to attract this group of users? Our answer is quite simple: you should go for keywords that have proved their ability to drive conversions.

Let’s focus on the following case:

You can see that effective phrases can be easily identified with the help of conversion rates and their low costs.

Also, include the keywords like ‘buy’, ‘best price’, ‘free shipping’ (if you offer it), and other ones that reflect a buying intent. These words will help you drive the users who want to make a purchase.

Get this: you’re going to control your budget more effectively if you utilise narrow keywords. However, it’s also worth using broader phrases as well, because they help improve the ad reach. Plus, in case you offer products/services that are characterised by low demand, you risk getting no traffic at all without broad match keywords.

Anyway, you have to constantly keep track of the campaign to make effective decisions.

If your budget lets it, you may try using all types of matches. Eventually, you can negate the queries that fail to drive conversions or make them cost too much. Yet, if you’re on a tight budget, utilise exact keywords.

To Wrap it Up

In conclusion, it’s important to track the efficiency of your marketing efforts and find out which strategies really work to cut down your budget. Combine different approaches and achieve your goals. We hope that you find our guide helpful.