A Wordstream report showed that a typical small business owner spends about $1500 on Adwords and wastes 25% of their ad budget. That?s $4,500 a year. We often find that this is much worse in unmanaged accounts.
We just saved a small business owner over $10,000 in wasted advertising expense and in this post I will outline to two key ways you can do that in your Adwords account, especially if you just operate it as a set and forget approach.
Get Active In Your Adwords Account
How often do you make changes in your Adwords account?? Given all the other things you have to do, it?s not surprising that you may not be actioning changes as often as you need to. You are not alone in this, the same Wordstream report showed that that only 1% of business owners who run their own Adwords made changes consistently on a weekly basis.
In fact, only half of you do any ad optimisation changes on a quarterly basis and 4 in 10 are not adding a negative keyword in the last 30 days.
Don?t Get Smug If You Have Someone Managing Your Account
Unfortunately, you can?t afford to be smug just because you are paying someone to manage your account. I recently took over two Adwords account where there was PPC manager looking after both of the accounts. There had been now changes on the account for over 2 months?yet the business owners were paying for PPC management.
You can check up on your PPC manager by going into your Adwords account (just search Google for ?Adwords account login? and enter your Google account username and password. Ask the PPC manager for it if you have forgotten.
Then go to the main menu and select Tools > History? to check up on them.
Use Keyword Negatives
Are you using keyword negatives to eliminate wasted clicks? This is the single biggest problem we see in Adwords accounts we look at.? Business owners start using Adwords with broad match keywords and end up getting their ads clicked for search terms that are not related to their business.
Here?s a couple of examples that prove the point. in this search I?m primarily looking for Adwords problems, but Westpac?s ad is showing because I added the term Account. Westpac should probably be specifying what type of account they want to show for.
In this example, Ovivo, and industrial water company are showing for a search term about home water softeners because home is not specified as a keyword negative.
This aspect of Adwords management is relatively straight forward?it just requires two things:
- Setting up a good list of keyword negatives before you start bidding on broad match, modified broad match and phrase match keywords
- Constant management of the search terms report to add search terms that you don?t want to be clicked for
Take Action
Take action on your Adwords account.
- Get active on the account each week. Set a time and ensure that the important gets done ahead of the urgent. 30 minutes a week could save you anywhere from $5,000 ? $10,000.
- Use keyword negatives
Do you want a review of how your Adwords account is going?? Give me a call or contact us to get a free Adwords Grading report ? it?s simple and will take you just a couple of minutes and might save you $1,000?s.