Yes, we know, it’s not Google AdWords anymore. But just like Opal Fruits (Starburst) and Marathon (Snickers) it takes time to adjust to a new name when you’ve used it for so long.

On the 24th July 2018 Google changed Google AdWords to Google Ads. That’s 17 years of using that tool and, despite knowing full well that it’s now just Ads, we still find ourselves calling it AdWords. Plus a lot of our clients still call it that too.

So yes, Google Ads is the new Google AdWords. Google AdWords is dead. Long live Google Ads. But what we wanted to say was an update to a piece we reported on some weeks ago.

Back in June we wrote an article titled Quickly Saving Money on an AdWords Campaign. In that story we wrote about how we inherited a Pay Per Click (PPC) account from another agency and immediately made cost savings for the client.

By stopping the ads being shown worldwide, by preventing those ads being displayed 7 days a week, by reigning in the display of search ads on rotation for 24 hours a day, and by targeting potential clients within a more realistic locale, we saved the customer some money. It was probably only around £300-£500 per month but that’s a great saving for a small business.

Google’s Ads team did call us up immediately on the Monday morning following our PPC account optimisation to ask why the client’s account wasn’t getting as many clicks, so we calmly told them that the clicks we had culled were irrelevant. Why pay for a click from the USA or India when your client’s customer base is only as far away as Epsom or Egham?

So the Google employee advised us to perform certain optimisations on the account to make it perform better. Now, we have a great team of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and PPC experts here but we’re always open to listening to new ideas. We listened to Google. We implemented the changes. And after 24 hours we killed them off.

What happened was that the clicks went up, the bounce rate went up, the Click Through Rate (CTR) plummeted and the burn rate went up. The client was suddenly spending money at a rate that made us uncomfortable. So we looked at the data, decided it wan’t in the client’s interest and rolled back all the changes from the search giant.

Our client was back on track again, is within ad spend budget and is not wasting any more money.

What’s more, we continued to optimise our client’s paid search account and we managed to get a record number of conversions within budget. The client was extremely happy and called to say thank you for getting their phone to ring more than it had done in months.

Furthermore, the client’s confidence in digital marketing was restored and they went out and invested in some new equipment for their business, which we know was in excess of £100,000.

The record number of conversions we achieved was actually equal to the historical record in their Google Ads account. So we admit that it wasn’t the first time they’d hit this record number.

However, the really important point was that the top number of digital leads they generated in 2017 was at an immense cost. We managed that level of lead generation for just £1,000. Last year their previous agency did it for a jaw-dropping £5,000.

So we managed to achieve the same top level of qualified leads for an 80% cost saving. To be honest, the previous agency did throttle back on spend but they never again got the same number of results. So that’s what we call saving more money on Google AdWords campaigns.

Here at Clever, the Hampshire digital marketing agency, we’re just very pleased that our expertise saved our client a princely sum. Not just that but our cost savings allowed them to invest in their business so that they can grow.

We could generate more leads for their business if we focused on using Bing Ads (Now called Microsoft Advertising) for them but they already have more phone calls than they can handle.

That’s Clever Marketing.

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See savings and improvements on your PPC accounts and get in touch with us here at Clever Marketing, the Hampshire PPC agency.

Call us on 01276 534 680 or you can fill in our easy form to show us your website address and we’ll take a look at that for you.