Too many junk clicks!
PicNet had been doing Adwords for about 10 years, and were pretty happy.
But they got a lot of calls from people looking for things they didn’t sell!
How did I fix it?
They needed to stop wasting money on clicks from people looking for services PicNet didn't sell. Then we could spend that money on people who were looking for their services.
​
​
Without realising it, PicNet were appearing for searches they didn't really want to be appearing for.
​
This might sound like something that's easy to avoid, but it's actually not that easy. Google’s keyword match types can be a bit confusing, and Google has changed the definitions of these match types a few times over the years. This makes is pretty common for businesses to appear for searches they don't realize they're appearing for.
​
PicNet had been getting clicks for searches like "apple tech support", "foxtel tech support" and many others like this.
​
Cumulatively, this added up to a lot of clicks. In fact, 69% of their budget was being spent on clicks that had zero chance of buying from PicNet.
​
To fix this problem I had to make changes to their keyword match types and regularly started adding negative keywords. I also and ring fenced certain keywords so we could more clearly see whether we should keep them or not.
1. Tighten up those keywords
​
Doing the above might sound pretty obvious, but it actually goes against the grain of what many clients think (and some Google Ad managers too). Some people think the more clicks you get the better. And that a high Click Through Rate (CTR) is a good thing, no matter what.
But for PicNet we needed to stop wasting money on irrelevant clicks. So we were happy to get fewer overall clicks if we could see that the clicks were coming from people who were actually in the market for PicNet's services.
So that meant we needed to deter some people from clicking. To do this we:
-
explicitly stated “For Medium & Large Businesses” to try to reduce clicks from Ma & Pop stores, and small businesses where someone had spilled coffee on the WiFi router.
-
we added more technical jargon such as “Remote Help Desk”, “Managed Services” and “Cloud Services”. If someone understands this language there's a better chance they'll be a good lead. If they don’t understand they probably won't be a good lead. And hopefully they'll see the ad, not get it, and hopefully not click (perfect!).
2. Write ads that attract suitable people, and deter unsuitable people.
The Results
In the two months before I worked with PicNet, they spent 69% of their budget on clicks where the person searching was looking for something PicNet didn't sell. That figure is now down to 11%.
So previously 31% of their budget was going to clicks where the person was looking for something PicNet offered. That 31% figure is now up to 89%. That's the equivalent of increasing their budget 2.9 times!