Campaign Targeting Settings: Settings within your campaigns such as location, device, and network targeting can all influence where you generate clicks and wasted spend from.
- Location Targeting: If you find that your keywords are generating clicks from specific geographic locations but are not generating conversions, you can exclude that area from your location targeting to avoid unprofitable clicks from that location.
- Device Bid Adjustments: Your mobile bid adjustment can influence whether or not your keywords generate clicks and spend from searches made on mobile devices. Much like location settings, if you know that your business rarely receives conversions on mobile devices (or does not offer a positive mobile experience), you can set your mobile bid adjustment to -100%. This will effectively tell Google to stop showing your ads on mobile devices, so that you can eliminate irrelevant clicks through that channel.
- The Search and Display Networks behave very differently from each other, and this can influence your click and spend data. The Search Network is much more transactional in nature, whereas the Display Network tends to be more informational. If your ads are more transactional in nature and better suited for the Search Network, clicks that come in from the Display Network may not lead to many conversions. It might be worth turning off Display targeting, to avoid these types of clicks.
All of the settings mentioned here are available at the campaign level, under the Manage PPC tab in WordStream.
Create More Targeted Ad Groups: If your ad groups have a high number of keywords, it can be difficult to create ad text that is truly relevant to your full keyword list. As a general rule of thumb, we recommend creating ad groups with no more than 20 to 30 keywords. All of the terms should be semantically related, around a specific theme, which will allow you to write ad text that is highly targeted to your ad group. If your keyword groups are more specific and can lend themselves to highly relevant ad text, then you can increase your efficiency of clicks. Ad groups that have more generic ad text can lead to clicks from searchers that may not find what they are looking for. Those clicks will likely result in little to no conversions, leaving you with wasted spend.
If you are looking to break your ad group into more tightly themed groupings, try using WordStream’s Split Ad Groups Tool or Keyword Workbench.
Adjust Your Ad Text: To draw attention to your ad text and capture appropriate clicks, be sure to create ads that resonate with your target audience. Phrasing your ad’s message precisely to the correct audience should help reduce the number of unwanted clicks and wasted spend. Your ads should be highly relevant to your ad group’s theme or topic and should contain your high-volume keywords from their respective ad group. In addition, there are a number of technical adjustments you can execute to make your ads stand out. Here are a couple easy tweaks that we recommend trying:
- Create a “mega headline” by adding punctuation to the end of line 1. This will make your first line eligible to be tacked on to your headline, creating a longer, more eye-catching headline. Keep in mind that this feature is only available when your ads appear at the top of Google Search Results page.
- Manipulate your display URL to serve as marketing copy. Remember, the only requirement for the display URL is that the domain must match the domain of the destination URL. After the domain, you are free to include of your top keywords, which will demonstrate to the searcher that they are going to a highly targeted landing page. You can even remove the “www.” from the display URL, in order to free up valuable space in the line.
- Highlight any special offers in your ad, such as “free shipping” or “free consultation”, to entice searchers to click. Remember, these offers must be true and should be reflected in your landing page offers.
- Try to dissuade the wrong searchers from clicking on your ad. By including as many qualifiers about your business, products, and offerings in your ad text as possible, it should help searchers understand exactly what they can find on your landing page. If they can see this initially in your ad text, it should help prevent them from clicking on your ads, and ensure you only pay for valuable clicks.
When creating a new ad in WordStream, you will be prompted to incorporate these strategies through the Best Practices Check located in our Ad Builder.