11 Strategies to Cut PPC Budget and Barely Harm Performance
This results in a challenge for PPC account managers operating Paid Search ads on Google Ads. We’re faced with continually fluctuating monthly budgets. If you’re confronted with the potential of decreasing spend but want to negatively affect conversions as little as possible, then there are various alternatives that you might attempt. The particular approach (or combination of ways) that you use to lower spend will depend on the status of your account and your individual goals, but here are eleven things that you could try to drop spend on your PPC account:
1. Pause keywords
Perhaps the easiest thing to do is to suspend keywords, ad groups or campaigns to reduce down cost. If there are any campaigns, ad groups or keywords that are performing very poorly, then you could decide to suspend these. If you choose to suspend a campaign, then you will benefit from the spend reductions that result from that. If you decide to put an ad group or keyword on hold, then you will also need to reduce the budget for that campaign in order to ensure that you spend less money overall.
You could begin stopping keywords or ad groups by first eliminating high-spending keywords or ad groups that are not converting into sales. You may also consider halting conversions for keywords that have a CPA or ROAS that is excessively high. This would be another option.
2. Drop bids
Simply lowering bids is yet another uncomplicated strategy. The act of lowering your bids will either result in a decrease in your impression share, which indicates that your advertisements will show fewer times, a fall in the position of your advertisements in relation to other sponsored advertisements, or a mix of the two.
This will lead to a decrease in the amount of traffic that is created by PPC; but, it will also mean that the cost of each click that you receive will be lower than it would have been if your bids had been greater. Therefore, despite the fact that this will bring to a decrease in traffic as well as a decrease in spending, the fact that the cost of your clicks has decreased should result in a decrease in the number of conversions you experience. While simultaneously improving your CPA or ROne strategy involves lowering bids across the board for all of your keywords.
However, doing so will result in a reduction of spending on both high-performing and low-performing keywords. Finding the terms in your account that have the worst performance and removing your bids from those keywords is a better course of action to take.
3. Reduce spend on upper-funnel keywords
Upper funnel keywords are those that users are likely to look for when they are still in the beginning stages of their conversion journey. These keywords may prove useful in raising consumers’ awareness of a brand and guiding customers farther along the sales funnel, which may ultimately result in a lead or a sale. But the profits from using these keywords won’t be as high as they are from using lower funnel keywords.
If you’re having trouble cutting spending, one option is to minimize the amount you spend on keywords in the top part of the sales funnel. This will ensure that the keywords in the lowest part of your funnel that have the strongest performance will still be able to show up in prominent positions.
Putting a hold on keywords in the upper part of the funnel can result in a good short-term improvement in performance. If, on the other hand, your higher funnel keywords were luring people farther down the funnel and encouraging people to look for your lower funnel keywords, then you run the danger of eliminating searches for your lower funnel keywords if you get rid of your upper funnel keywords.
If you want to decrease your spending on keywords that are further up the funnel, you should monitor the number of customers that convert. If you find that the conversion rate for keywords in the lower part of the funnel begins to decline, the problem may lie in the fact that you have reduced the amount of money spent on keywords in the upper part of the funnel.
4. Reduce your bid to a target with a lower CPA or ROAS.
If you already have a Cost per Acquisition (CPA) or Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) target in mind that you are working towards, you should consider aiming a CPA or ROAS that is less aggressive. Because of this, you won’t reduce your bids on keywords that are already bringing in conversions at a lower CPA or ROAS than what you’re seeking; rather, you’ll only reduce your spending on keywords that aren’t bringing in as much revenue for you.
If the vast majority of your keywords have a very high search top impression share and you don’t mind if their position on the page drops a little bit, this method is a solid option for you to consider. If your keywords have a low search impression share, lowering your bids could put them in a position on the page where they are less likely to receive many clicks. This is a risk you run if you decide to take this course of action.
5. Dimensions with a poor performance record
One of the parts of PPC and Google Ads that I appreciate the most is the abundance of targeting options and ways to segment data in order to determine which aspects of an account are doing the best and which are performing the worst. It is important to examine whether a certain age group or gender performs better or worse on your account. If there is one dimension that is performing significantly worse than the others, then you might want to consider either omitting that dimension entirel
lowering your price for that particular location. This will assist in lowering expenditures in a region that wasn’t operating very effectively previously.
Click on the ‘Demographics’ tab, and then select either ‘Age’ or ‘Gender’ depending on the demographic whose performance you are interested in analyzing. This will allow you to view the results of your campaigns broken down by age group or gender. You can also check at performance based on household income if you are an advertising in the United States.
6. Display Select and search Partners.
Take a look at how Search Partners and Display Select have been performing. If the performance of either of these two choices is lower than that of the search network, then you might want to think about turning them off. You are able to reduce your spending on the Search Network without negatively impacting your performance by turning off either Search Partners or Display Select.
When you are in the campaign view of Google Ads, click on Segments, and then click on ‘Network (with Search Partners)’. This will allow you to examine the performance of Search Partners as well as Display Select. You are now able to view the performance of Search Partners and Display Select in relation to that of the Google Search Network.
7. Examine the period of the month in question.
The performance of several of my PPC accounts seems to fluctuate based on the time of the month, which is something that I frequently observe. For instance, I frequently observe an increase in conversion rates between the tail end and the beginning of each month. Although this is not true for all markets, it is likely because the majority of people receive their paychecks toward the end of the month and are therefore in a better financial position to make larger purchases during this time.
It is beneficial to evaluate the effectiveness of your Google AdWords PPC account on a period-by-period basis throughout the month. After that, you may examine the conversion rates that occurred over the course of the month and devise a plan for the days of the week on which you will place more competitive bids and the days on which you will cut your overall advertising spending.
8. Ad scheduling CVR by Portion of Month CVR by Portion of Month
From modifying the aggressiveness of bids based on the time of the month to modifying bids according on the time of day or the day of the week instead. Is there a certain hour of the day or a particular day of the week that has an especially poor performance? If so, rather than lowering prices across the board, you might want to give some thought to lowering bids during the hours or days during which your business has performed the worst.
As an illustration, the conversion rate tends to drop after midnight and remains low until about six in the morning in several specific niches. If this is the case in your industry as well, you might want to consider lowering your bids or turning off the ads during these certain hours. One further illustration would be a branch that achieves its highest levels of productivity during normal business hours. They could lower their expenditures by making use of a bid decrease during the hours in which their office is closed.
It is essential to keep track of performance because you can discover that you have turned off PPC advertising during hours in which your clients are conducting research. This, in turn, could result in a decrease in sales or leads at periods of peak performance for your business. It is imperative that you make use of a conversion attribution option that assigns credit to a number of different touchpoints. Because of this, the likelihood of reduced bids occurring during research hours will be reduced.
9. Targeting of specific locations
Examine the performance of the site, and identify the areas that perform exceptionally poorly. You can either exclude these sites from consideration or limit the amount of money you spend on them by lowering your bid.
Be sure that you are only basing your decisions on areas that have adequate evidence before moving further. In the event that you do not take this precaution, you run the risk of blocking out or reducing your offer on a low-volume sector that would have otherwise performed profitably.
10. Allocate some of your traffic to organic sources.
Keep an eye out for keywords for which you already have a number one organic ranking and for which there is no sponsored competition. Ads PPC Even if you stopped all sponsored activity on these keywords, there is a good likelihood that this traffic would continue come to your site through your organic listing because of how highly these keywords are ranked. If you execute this strategy correctly, you will be able to lower your spending without losing any traffic or sales/leads.
Just make sure that the person to whom you are accountable is aware of this, since you are likely to experience a decrease in traffic and conversions while organic sees the opposite effect. Organic traffic and conversions are likely to decrease. When you receive your next PPC report, which appears to show a decrease in performance, while at the same time the SEO team is producing great figures, you won’t have any questions to answer because of this.
There is a line of reasoning that suggests certain consumers may become distracted by the listings that are located below your position one organic listing, and that having an additional listing in the form of a PPC ad can reduce the possibility that this will take place. If you do decide to pause any keywords and provide the traffic to your organic listings, then you need to make sure that you keep an eye on your reports to ensure that the traffic is still coming to your site via an organic listing even after you have paused the keywords.
11. Conduct research on high-volume keywords that aren’t exact matches
If you have a large number of non-exact match keywords in your account that have a lot of traffic and are converting pretty well, then it is possible that now is a good moment to begin addressing those keywords.
You may examine the traffic that is coming through these non-exact match terms, and then begin cutting out words or queries that are not doing well. Eliminating queries that are inappropriate or have a poor return on investment will assist bring down spending. If done correctly, it won’t have any negative effect on conversions, but it will reduce the amount of money you spend.
One more strategy would be to extract from a general keyword the high-performing and high-volume keyword themes, and then either stop pursuing the general keyword or lower the amount of effort you are putting into it. Because of this, you will be able to minimize the amount of money you pay on your broad keyword while at the same time keeping the high-quality traffic that it was bringing in. This may be a procedure that requires a lot of work on your part, depending on how many high-volume wide keywords you already have in the account. How effectively you can use this strategy to save costs will be determined by the amount of free time you have.
PPC (pay-per-click) budgets are subject to alter on a monthly basis for some businesses. If you need to reduce your pay-per-click spending for any reason, then the strategies discussed above should be helpful. The precise way or combination of methods that you use to reduce your spending will be determined by the amount that you need to reduce it by as well as the status of your account at the time that you are reducing it.