4 Simple Hacks To Do More With Your Paid Search Budget

We’ve all seen it in our time, as paid search marketers, the bold red alert in our campaign status column.

While sometimes we have the ability to increase our daily spend for the campaign, other times our marketing budget can be tight. If you find yourself in this position (or just want to use your budget more efficiently), there are a handful of quick and effective ways to optimize your spend. Let’s dive in!

Keywords

The keywords we bid on play an important part in our spend, but it’s important to look beyond them and explore your search query report. If you’ve been bidding on a lot of broad match terms, you could find yourself showing ads for a variety of queries that are an inefficient use of your spend. 

In this instance, you can either negate the queries from being shown for your campaign again or pause the broad match keyword altogether. Remember, the stronger your campaign performance, the more efficient your bidding will be for your active keywords. So it’s important to run maintenance search query reports, even if you aren’t just trying to cut back on unnecessary spend.

Location

Where you’re bidding can also impact your daily spend. Bigger DMAs and geographic regions can pull in much higher CPCs based on your industry, and it can take more work to pull in efficient leads and conversions. If your daily budget limits you, it’s worth exploring your location data to see if there are any regions where you have a high spend but little to no return. In these instances, you can exclude them from your locations to bid on.

Ad Copy

Ensuring your ads remain updated and relevant to your keywords and landing page experience is important for efficient spend. The better the ad experience, the more likely it is for Google to not only show your ads but also improve your chances of gaining a more efficient CPC. Make sure you’re running two to three Responsive Search Ads (RSAs) per ad group to provide the most variety possible and for more data about which ad is performing best and what you need to optimize. 

Bid Strategy

If you’re limited by budget, you don’t want to pay more than necessary for a bid. And if you’re still using manual CPCs, there’s a good chance you’re paying more than you need. By using an automated bid strategy, Google’s algorithm can increase or decrease your bid by keyword based on the user’s query and the likelihood of converting or clicking based on your business goals.

While your daily spend may still be tight after taking these steps, know that your campaigns and your budgets will be operating more efficiently.

Need a second set of eyes? Our team is always happy to help. Contact us today.