5 Signs You Could Be Wasting PPC Spend

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Vibhu Satpaul

date icon Nov 25, 2019

date icon 10 min read

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In today’s market space where digital marketing is the most efficient and cost-effective tool for marketing your brand, Pay Per Click (PPC) has established itself as a key component of digital marketing. It has become crucial for online businesses. Over time it has gained industry experts recommend enough traction top as one of the best digital marketing strategies. So most of the website owners and digital marketers are now going for the PPC campaigns.

PPC works on the notion that you pay for the number of clicks you get on your link. These links might be relevant to your business or not. Most of the time visitors click on your link but do not buy anything or do not engage with your content. In short, you pay for an unconverted lead. This happens more than often. So to trim this down, we have created a comprehensive list of pointers where you could have gone wrong in your PPC expenditure plan.

As more and more people get attracted to the PPC campaigns, the market becomes saturated, and they come across various difficulties. Then some marketers complain that even after using PPC methods, they are not generating enough traffic or the ROI is very less of their business. So to clear the confusion and give the users a clear picture of PPC campaigns, here are five signs that you could be wasting your PPC spend.

Negative Keywords

Without conducting a thorough online search and creating a list, you might be adding keywords that are not relevant for your business. These keywords that do not promote your business are known as negative keywords. This way, you are paying for searches that do not hold any importance to your business.

To avoid this, you need to give time and that too at regular intervals. You can sit for 20 minutes each week to optimize your keywords and draft your content around those keywords. As PPC advertising is dynamic, you need to keep pace with its evolution. Also, everyone is trying to gain an edge in this saturated digital market, so you need to optimize your PPC strategy regularly or else you might lose out to the competition.

Eliminate Non-Converting Keywords

Take a moment and ask yourself this question. Is it really necessary to spend on keywords that are not converting any leads? And that too when the lead conversion is the end target of your marketing campaign.

Most digital marketers do not realize this, and they end up losing a large portion of their PPC campaign on the non-converting keywords. Most businesses have keywords or possibly an entire ad which have not driven a single conversion for them. Yet they are paying for those keywords and ads. You can set up a filter for these keywords and eliminate them.

Also, if your PPC campaign is using the last-click attribution, you must check your search attribution data to look out for any early-stage keywords that lead to a conversion. You must also check other conversion models like position-based attribution.

Cut Search Partners Spend

When you start your campaign Google by default, joins your campaigns in its search partners network. This can be a great boost for your campaigns in the initial phases, but then you need to measure the performance of the search engine partners. Basically, this network connects you to several search engines that are powered by Google. So it would not be necessarily beneficial for your business.

As a result, you need to keep track of the conversions that this network of partners is driving for your business. And after some time, when the network is not contributing towards lead conversions, you must opt-out of it.

The sad part here is that Google does neither facilitate for you to see the data of the partner networks, nor does it have the option to selectively opt-out of the specific search partners.

Focus Location Targeting

You must pay attention to the user location report of your website. It reflects the diversity in your user base and you get the idea of the locations where your ads are being displayed.

You can optimize this process by targeting the location that you think are relevant for your business. By default, Google shows your ad in the location that it deems are important for your business. The problem with this is that it does this on a global basis. Hence, the ads are displayed around the globe and lead to unwanted clicks that do not have any potential for sales.

To prevent this, go through your user location report and spot the cities, states, and countries that are generating unwanted traffic for you. These locations often do not provide any conversions at all.

Analyze Device-level Performance

This is a crucial indicator of wasting PPC spend. Digital marketers must know their campaign performance on different devices. They must be aware of how their campaigns look and perform across various devices, namely desktop, mobile, and tablet. Sometimes the look and feel of the campaigns might be the same across devices, but the performances vary. The main reason behind this is your website’s responsiveness and performance on various devices. So if you have a website that performs differently on various platforms, you must implement bid modifiers. These bid modifiers control your CPC and spend. They prevent you from spending unnecessarily on the devices that perform worse than the others.

Conclusion

So, these are some of the ways by which you can spend your PPC budget. PPC budget can be trimmed and tailored around your conversions so that you do not need to pay for something which is not giving output for your business. After all, at the end of the day, businesses are here to make profits and nobody would want to waste their budget on unnecessary and frivolous things. So, follow these pointers and win your PPC campaign.

To know more about PPC and Digital Marketing Click Here.

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