Quickly Saving Money on AdWords Campaigns

Saving money on AdWords is something we genuinely enjoy doing for our clients here at Clever Marketing. We get a lot of enquiries for assistance with Pay Per Click (PPC) campaigns and many of them are from businesses who’ve not been looked after properly. Priding ourselves on great service, we love taking on these new clients and showing them real savings, return on investment and performance on their digital marketing campaigns.

For example, last week we had a call that went something like this:

“Hello, you’re a web design company in Surrey, can you help us please? We’re getting no enquiries!”

We looked at their website and, in a word, it was shocking. We found the following glaring issues:

The main website they showed us was a .co.uk but, as we crawled the site, we noticed that some of the pages switched to a .com domain. It looked like the designers or previous “SEO experts” had been trying to cross-link the domains, possibly trying to rank for two domains rather than one.

Then we spotted that simple problem of some URLs being www, others not, a typical “schoolboy error” that we see so often.

There were also URL redirects, mystery redirects, doorway pages, broken links, missing robots.txt files, no XML sitemap, oh, the list goes on.

So there was a lot of potential “black hat” SEO going on by the look of things. Getting enquiries at the expense of best practice is something we don’t do here at our digital marketing agency. We do things by the book and stick to “white hat SEO”, making sure our work is ethical as well as innovative.

But it was the PPC account that we had a quick look at that gave us kittens.

The client had spent over £1,000 on Google AdWords in the first three weeks of this month and said they’d not seen a single bit of business come through in those few weeks. So we took a look and in 5 minutes we spotted the following…

1. We saw that the client’s ads were running 7 days a week. Looking at when they got the few conversions that they had, it wasn’t on Saturday or Sunday. So we set the ad schedule from Monday to Friday. That alone would save a couple of hundred pounds per month.

2. The next point of contention was that the ads were being shown 24 hours a day. Now some products sell 24/7 but again we checked the time of the conversions and none were before 09:00 and the latest was 13:00. So we took a judgement call on this, worked out when we believed the client’s customers were active and decided to allow the ads to be shown between 08:00 and 18:00 in the evening. Again, this should also save at least £100 in the 3 weeks the ads had been running so that will amount to greater savings over the course of a month.

3. Then we reviewed the geographical targeting of the campaigns. There were a number of campaigns that seemed to be geographically restricted, according to their naming conventions. But on further inspection of the settings we noticed that they were being shown across the world! Luckily the number of clicks were relatively low but even so we fixed these geographical issues and saved roughly £100 a month for the client.

Adding up the savings we believe that the very quick analysis of the PPC account will save the client around £500 a month. That’s half of what they were spending previously and, if the conversion rates continue at the current rate, the Cost Per Click (CPC) will have halved as well.

However, this week we need to really dive into their account and see what we can do to give them genuine value for money. They need ROI so we’re here to achieve that for them. We may have to pause the campaigns and start again from scratch. But whatever we do as a digital marketing agency we need to perform for our clients.

So, saving money on AdWords is something we could do for you too as a premier Hampshire PPC agency.


Clever Marketing - Hampshire SEO & Digital Agency If you’ve got an AdWords account and you need to get the most out of it, please do give us a call. We’re on 01276 402 381 or you can fill in our easy contact form.

We’ll do your keyword research, build your ads, adjust your landing pages and increase your Click Through Rate (CTR) and conversions but drive down Cost Per Click.

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