How to find out if you're wasting money on Adwords

How to find out if you're wasting money on Adwords

Many of us here have been using Adwords to push PPC traffic to our websites for many years now and don't plan on stopping anytime soon.  Adwords is an amazing platform with many options to push your ads in front of the right people, but could you be wasting money on your campaigns?

A lot of people set up a simple campaign and just let it run.  If they make money soon after their ads are running they just credit it to Adwords and think they have a great campaign on their hands, but they could actually be wasting money on clicks that will never convert.

It's not rocket science, but it's not the easiest thing to do, so you will need to invest some time into setting up your Adwords campaign.  Even when your campaign is set up and running well you'll still need to monitor it to be sure it stays productive and keeps sending in the right traffic!


Here are a few ways to figure out if your Adwords campaign is at peak performance and not wasting money on clicks.


Targeting the right people is crucial
When you set up your ad it might be tempting to target everyone in the world because you think you have the best product or service in the world.  In reality, you need to get super targeted when setting up your ads if you want to be as successful as possible.  You can set up multiple ads, aimed at different URLs, and targeting different groups of people all at the same time.

Think about it, would you rather have one ad that is targeting everyone you want or would you rather set up 10 different ads targeting 10 different groups and sending them to 10 specific URLs on your website in order to convert them quicker.  You can target people across your niche, send them to your homepage, and hope they will find the right page of your website and make a sale but that just doesn't happen.  Instead, set up an ad that sends specific people directly to the page they are looking for and stop wasting money on clicks/people that will end up bouncing right away because they don't see exactly what they want!


Country targeting is a necessity
It doesn't matter if you're a Fortune 500 company or small business that is drop shipping, you will need to target specific countries and exclude others.  Think about it, if you're selling cars or boats you probably don't want to target anyone outside of your country because not many people are going to cross borders to buy something like that.  

You don't have to exclude all the countries you don't want to advertise to, you just have to include the countries you want to show your ads to.

If you're a global seller and are worried about chargebacks and refunds, it's probably a good thing to exclude countries like India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, etc. because they will not only burn through your entire budget quickly but they have a higher than normal dispute/refund/chargeback rate.  If you had them included and started to run your ad you may have seen all the clicks coming in already but you shouldn't be worried when you go from 150 clicks down to 25 after you exclude them!  You'll get fewer clicks, save money, and have fewer chargebacks usually.


Your Keyword Matches
Now, this is a little more advanced and people tend to just target broad keywords because it's easier.  I tend to set everything to Broad and go in to target exact keywords with a slightly higher bid for each click.  

If you're targeting Broad keywords for everything then you'll likely show up for absolutely everything related to your keywords, and that's not always a good thing lol.  You'll need to watch to see what you're showing up for, watch the search terms sending in traffic, and add some things to your negative keyword list.  As of right now, I have 174 keywords added to my negative keywords list and that number grows every week.  I have a broad, phrase, and exact match keywords in my negative list and I've noticed that I get better targeting every week because of adding them

Using phrase and exact match keywords should be used if you really know what you want to target.  After you set them you should also increase the bid for them slightly so you know for sure you're going to be shown.  You will usually get less traffic when targeting like this, but it's usually more targeted, and that means the conversion rates are much higher   I like adding phrase and exact keyword matches in the beginning if I know what I want to rank for and I will also add some others as time goes on because I didn't think some specific keywords would bring in quality traffic.  This is why you need to always monitor your Adwords campaigns



In the end, you'll constantly have to tweak your ads and be sure they are performing the best they possibly can.  Switch up the ads, show different banners, use different types of ads, add keywords, add negative keywords, delete keywords, etc.  If you're running a campaign and you've never looked at its performance, you're likely losing money and that needs to change!  Go fix your campaign, monitor its performance, and be sure you're profiting



Thanks for reading!

- Tommy
https://www.seoclerks.com/user/Tommy