Stripped to its bare essentials, the core principal of Google Ads is actually quite simple: we spend money in Google Ads because we want to increase a specific action (or actions) on our website.
Simple, right?
Despite the seemingly inherent simplicity behind this statement, I frequently see marketing companies and other businesses judging the progress and "success" of their paid search efforts through the lens of other misleading KPIs such as click through rate, impression share, total clicks, etc., when in reality those merely serve as distraction from the primary goal.
I prefer to avoid distractions.
While different types of conversions vary from website to website, there are three universal strategies that can be implemented within Google Ads itself (i.e., these have nothing to do with landing pages) to guarantee an increase conversions and conversion rates without elevating your total budget.
1) Reducing Bids
This is easily the most effective strategy for producing immediate conversion increases. However, this strategy ONLY works if you are exhausting the daily budget of a campaign. For emphasis purposes, I feel obligated to repeat the previous statement - this strategy only works (insert a million exclamation points here) if you are exhausting the daily budget within a particular campaign. Let's examine why.
Let's say your daily budget within a campaign is $100, and every day by 3:00 pm it runs out of money. By strategically reducing bids on every keyword within that campaign, each click will consequently cost less, and therefore you will produce more clicks every day for the same $100. More clicks every day for the same amount of money will naturally equate to more conversions. This is a highly nuanced and frequently misunderstood strategy, particularly since click through rates naturally decline when bids are reduced. However, click through rate is easily the most overrated of all KPIs in Google Ads, and it is undeniably wiser to increase total traffic and total conversions (without spending more money) at the expense of CTR. I have written more about this particular strategy in exhaustive detail in a previous blog, for those of you seeking additional information.
2) Negative keywords
Checking your keyword query reports should be a routine occurrence. The keyword query reports tell you exactly what queries (searches) have triggered prior clicks, and should assist with the growth of your negative keyword list quite substantially.
By analyzing which queries are actually generating clicks you can very easily stamp out any unrelated or undesirable searches from ever wasting your money again. By eliminating waste, you consequently guarantee that more and more of your clicks are relevant, which therefore increases conversions without increasing your budget.
3) Manipulating bids/budgets
This strategy is slightly more simplistic. At the highest level, it usually behooves marketers to spend more money in campaigns and ad groups that produce more conversions. Shifting budget away from poor performing campaigns is a very quick and very simplistic solution, and can be done with a minimal amount of deep understanding.
However, because budgets cannot be altered at the ad group level, one should dive deeper and look at individual keyword performance within each ad group. Some keywords will naturally perform better than others, and tightening bids on keywords that perform poorly should have the dual impact of reducing wasteful spending while also allowing keywords that perform better to spend more, all without requiring you to elevate your daily or monthly total budgets.
I hope this blog has provided you with hope that increasing Google Ads without spending more total money is a totally feasible goal through strategic optimization. For more detailed guidance, please contact GRAYBOX for a free consultation!