Today I'm going to show you five ways that your Google ads are probably wasting money.
But not only that, I'm going to show you how to fix it as well.
Stay tuned.
Hi, Mike Mancini with PPCVideoTraining.com.
Today, I'm going to show you five ways your Google ads are wasting money.
I'm going to show you inside some real Google accounts just exactly what I'm talking about.
But not only that, but how to fix it.
Let's get started.
Number one, targeting the wrong location.
A lot of people do not get deep into their stats, and realize that, "You know what?
I'm targeting this whole area."
But what they don't realize is that one, or two, or three, or maybe even more of those
areas that they've targeted are not converting at all.
Why waste your money on those?
Let's dive into the settings, and I'll show you a little bit more.
Once you're inside your campaign, go click on Locations.
Then once you get here I want you to sort by conversions.
Once you're there, I want you to take a look at where your ads are converting the best.
Also, keep an eye on the cost per conversion.
If you see one of these cost per conversions getting way out of control ... so let's say
we got $18 here, 22, 20, 31.
This one's getting a little bit high, but I happen to know that there was a lot of phone
calls that came out of that area as well.
But if you start seeing some of these get up into 75, 85, 95, $100, it's probably not
worth it unless you really do get a good return on those.
It might not be worth targeting those locations.
In fact, it might be better to exclude them.
I always will scroll to the bottom, and I'll take a look at, "You know what?
In this area we've spent $87, not a single conversion.
And then this one we've spent 62, and not a conversion.
This one, we spent $141 and only had one conversion based on 51 clicks."
Now, obviously, I want to start looking at conversion rates too.
Where am I getting the best conversion rates?
Where am I not getting any?
But that's my point, take a look and start to exclude specific locations that aren't
working for you.
Now, some of these only have about five clicks, so I may not want to pause those yet.
I may want to give them some more time.
But what you should start doing is looking at, "You know what?
Maybe I want to remove these locations, maybe I want to exclude them."
whatever it might be, take a look and make sure that you're advertising in the locations
that you need to be advertising in.
Sometimes people will make mistakes, and all of a sudden they have a different state on
here because they entered a zip code in wrong, or they have an area that's just completely
outside of the service area.
They might have started with a huge area and then realized, "You know what?
I don't want to spend all my time in traffic and drive all the way across town."
Or whatever it might be.
Just take a look at your locations, and remove some locations that are not bringing you in
money.
The second way that people waste money in their Google Ads accounts is running ads 24
hours a day, seven days a week.
There are very few businesses that we have ever run ads for that they have converted
24 hours a day, seven days a week.
In fact, one of the only examples I can give you where it did work to run ads after midnight
was a divorce attorney.
And as weird as that sounds, but they ended up getting a lot of people coming home.
Maybe after dinner, they waited till their spouse went to bed, they just got in a fight,
maybe they've had a little too much to drink.
Whatever it may be, we found that there were more searches for that at night than there
was during the day.
Because during the day, it's a very discreet process, right?
People aren't necessarily going to be looking for a divorce attorney probably at work where
somebody could see over their shoulder.
Whatever it might be, they were waiting till they got home.
They were waiting until late at night, maybe everybody went to bed.
That's when they were searching the most.
Another good time would be is if you are running an e-commerce website, but you're running
it around the world.
Where maybe here it's midnight, but overseas it's seven or eight o'clock AM.
So you really need to watch and look at your statistics and see when people are converting,
and when they're not.
Chances are, you're probably going to want to turn your ads on at six or seven in the
morning, and maybe shut them off between seven and ten o'clock at night.
Now, if your business is dependent on them calling and speaking to someone, you want
to make sure you have your ads set up when somebody is there to answer the phone.
That is obviously key.
Third reason, bidding way too much on bad keywords.
Let's show you some examples.
All right, go into your campaign and then click on Keywords.
Now I want all ... sort all the keywords for your campaign, don't choose a specific ad
group necessarily.
Then when you're in here, you can filter them by All or All Enabled.
I've just got all here because I want to show you some examples of some of them that we
weeded out.
Take a look at this keyword which has been removed, and it has been clicked on 109 times
for a total cost of $204 and 49 cents.
Now what I did was I sorted this by cost per conversion.
So it's in declining order.
I automatically take a look at, "You know what?
$202 spent on this one conversion, way too much money."
Same thing here, this one's spent $363, it has only converted twice for a conversion
custom 181.
And what I do is I go down that way, and I start looking at, "You know what?
This one might have had 10 conversions, but it also spent $1,679 at a cost per conversion
of $157."
Now, it also depends on how much a lead is worth to you.
Is a lead worth $157 to you?
For most service businesses, it is not.
For this specific business, we want to see the leads under $50.
Anything in here, you need to not get emotional about it.
This is not an emotion based process, this is an analytical process that you go through
and you take a look at numbers.
I don't care if one of these keywords if I think it's going to be the best keyword ever.
I'm looking at it saying, "It's costing $136 to get a lead, that is almost three times
higher than what we want to keep it under."
So I will go through, and I will pause all of the ones that have a high cost per conversion.
I don't even need to necessarily even look at the keyword as much as I'm looking at the
numbers here.
Then what I will also do, is I will go through and I was sort it by cost.
Which keywords have we spent the most money on?
And are the conversions in line?
This one we spent $2,500 on, $81 a conversion.
Probably a little bit high, that's why we passed it.
Same thing here, 1,679.
That was already on the previous screen.
1,623, $105 a conversion.
I'm looking at where most of the wasted ad spend is going because this $2,500 can be
better suited going into a different keyword that might be converting at $37.
See what I mean?
We're going to take that $2,500 and put it towards other keywords that are converting
at a better cost per conversion.
Number four, this one ties a little bit into the previous one where you're bidding too
high on bad keywords.
Number four is bidding on non converting keywords.
Once again, inside your campaign, open up the Keywords and then sort by conversions.
Now, I will go all the way to the bottom, or I will just sort in reverse order.
I will start looking at how many clicks a keyword has had, and how many conversions.
I started by zero convergence, so literally ... let's see here.
I just fast forwarded here.
In the lifecycle of this campaign, there were 1,154 keywords.
Now, that's over ... I don't know how many ad groups right now off the top of my head.
But we had quite a few keywords in here because this was our test campaign.
We were running 1,154 keywords in the lifecycle of the campaign, only 117 of them actually
had any conversions.
Now, some of those keywords I think there were 1,037 of them that did not have any conversions.
Now, one way to figure out how much you're wasting is to go up here and add a filter,
and say Conversions, and do a plus or minus value.
So Conversions Greater ... let's say Less Than One, Apply.
You can see there were 563 conversions total in the campaign, but this one is pulled out.
1,037 keywords for total cost of $4,626.
That's literally one sixth of our campaign budget was spent on non-converting keywords.
In a lot of campaigns I've seen, that's not that bad.
I literally will go into campaigns and see that 80, 90% of the budget has gone to keywords
that don't convert.
So this is something to keep an eye on.
And granted, this one, this particular keyword has only had two clicks.
It's got a good click through rate.
The cost per click is manageable, but that might be something that we want to keep running
for a little bit longer.
Same thing with these, they've only had ... they've got good, really good click through rates.
The a cost per click is decent.
Those might be something that we want to keep running.
But then you get into keywords like this that have had 217 clicks, spent $376, no conversions.
That's a keyword that needs to be paused.
Number five, and this is one of the most important things you need to watch out for, sending
people to the wrong page.
If your ad is talking about red cars and you're taking someone to a page about blue trucks,
that's the wrong page.
If you're talking to someone about a specific service, and you're sending them to the homepage
of your website where they have to look for that service, or they have to click two or
three more times, or find it in the menu, or whatever it might be, that is the wrong
page.
You need to be sending people directly to the page of the service, or the product, or
whatever it might be that they are looking for.
The first click right away.
When you send your visitors to the right page, not only are you going to see your conversions
skyrocket, but you're going to give those visitors a better experience.
Google notices that.
And when they have a better experience, they click on your ads.
They take action, whether they're filling out a form, they're making the call, they're
purchasing.
When Google sees those actions, that's a good positive user experience.
Not only are they going to reward you for that by giving you lower cost per click, but
it's obviously going to be more money in your accounts.
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If you'd like to see more videos on how to set up or optimize your Google Ads accounts,
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as well as some other related videos.
Thanks so much for watching, hope it helped.
See you soon.