Google Ads: How irrelevant ads are costing you money, and what to do about it
Google Ads can be a quick and effective way to get your products and services in front of people who are actively searching for them. However, if you aren’t careful your ads will be showing to people who don’t care too much about what you have to offer. Discover why it happens and why it matters.
The importance of keywords
This is the quick guide to how keywords work, feel free to skip to the next section if you think you have this covered. During Google Ads set up you select keywords for your ad campaigns. These keywords are phrases that relate to your product and services and, most importantly, reflect the search term that your prospective customers will use. So, for example, if you sell insurance, you may use search terms such as ‘buy home insurance’, ‘find car insurance’ or ‘life insurance for over 50s’, depending on the products and services you are targeting.
If setup properly, each ad campaign will have a number of ad groups, and each of these ad groups will have multiple related keywords. The important thing to remember is that the keywords target the customer searches you are looking to show ads for.
The benefits of Google Ads
As Google search ads are linked to Google searches, your ads should appear when people use search terms containing the keywords you have selected. The benefits of this are obvious. Your ads show to potential customers who are already actively looking for whatever it is you are selling.
You don’t pay when your ads show up in search, you pay when a customer clicks on your ad. This feels like a very a very cost effective way of getting sales and leads, because the only people seeing and clicking your ads are already in a space where they want to buy right? Well maybe, but there are problems.
Google’s changes to match types (and what they mean for you)
Google Ads uses match types to serve your ads to your prospective customers, but the changes to these over the past couple of years will affect who now sees your ads.
Historically ‘exact match’ used to be just that. If someone types in ’buy home insurance’ and nothing more (using an example above). They would see your ad. Changes over time mean that ‘exact match’ looks at matching exact or very close meaning. So, the same search could trigger ads that have for example ‘buy house insurance’.
Similarly, ‘phrase match’ which will show ads if your keyword phrase is present but with other words, e.g. ‘where can I buy home insurance’, also matches, and you’d expect it to show. However, phrase match is now broader too, and may show for searches like ‘home buyers insurance’, that seems close enough, right? Wrong, home buyers insurance is a specific product in the UK to cover legal costs for sales falling through during house moves, and nothing to do with a standard home insurance policy.
Another recent change saw the removal of ‘broad match modifier’ as a match type. ‘Broad match’ gives your ads the widest reach, by showing them to much more variations of your keywords than other match types. ‘Broad match modifier’ allowed the slight refinement of ‘broad match’ to target ads more. This functionality has now been absorbed into ‘phrase match’.
The issue with these changes is that it sees Google Ads deciding whether to show your ads based on the meaning its algorithms give to your keywords. This can mean that your ads will show for irrelevant terms which will waste your money. Research done by Insite Web has shown, for example, ads for business bank accounts showing when users search for ‘company accountants’.
I don’t pay unless somebody clicks, so what does it matter?
The plain truth is that a surprisingly large number of people will click on an ad without reading it properly. Once they land on your website and see that you’re not offering what they’re looking for, they’ll leave.
So, you end up paying for clicks from people with no interest in your products and services, who don’t even stay on your site. You can mitigate this a little by making sure your ads are clear about what you’re selling, but you’ll still get unwanted clicks, each one costing you money.
What’s the solution?
The solution is to follow these rules in relation to your Google Ad campaigns, and Ad Groups
- rigorously manage and monitor your campaigns, and adgroups
- fully track all leads, calls and sales to measure success
- constantly review and optimise keywords to ensure that you block the search terms that are leading to your ads showing for irrelevant searches
- structure your campaigns to minimise similar keyword overlap/waste
- avoid using broad match keywords, they just waste money on irrelevant clicks
- conduct detailed upfront keyword research to build campaigns and ads
- avoid using Google’s broad automation, and maximise clicks settings, you want leads not clicks
Insite Web CEO likens over reliance on Google’s tools and automation to walking into a casino and handing your chips to the croupier! Having audited numerous Google Ads accounts, most are wasting 30-50% of their ad spend.
You want to maintain as much control over your budget and advertising as possible. Working with an experienced results driven PPC ad management company is the most straightforward way to keep on top of your account and cut wastage. Google Ads should be a cost-effective way to generate high-quality leads and sales for almost every business, but far too many companies adopt a hands-off approach, or simply don’t understand the complexities of the Google Ads platform, and it ends up costing them money. This is even more true for companies running multiple or complex ads campaigns, where it can seem impossible to check every aspect of a Google Ads account.
That’s why paying for professional PPC management and support is a no-brainer, any cost will be more than made up for in better leads and fewer wasted clicks.
