Did you know companies waste thousands of dollars a year on the wrong keywords?

According to Statista, Google’s ad revenue amounted to almost 134.81 billion U.S. dollars in 2019. The story that often doesn’t get reported, though, is how much of that revenue is from WASTED ad spend by companies.

Seer Interactive found that, on average, 12.5 percent of paid search budgets are spent on keywords or search terms that are either irrelevant to a company’s product/service, or aren’t converting (one of our clients had more than 30% of wasted spend!) Let’s say your monthly budget is $1,000 ($12,000 per year). That’s an estimated $1,500 in wasted spend (a month and half’s worth of budget!). What could you do with that extra $1,500? What if you could re-allocate it to search terms that have already proven to drive results? Think about how much more quickly you could achieve your goals.

How (if at all) are you monitoring your Google Ads spend?

Are you maintaining your account on a monthly, or even weekly basis to ensure that you’re eliminating terms that are eating your budget? More importantly, what are you doing with those savings to help you meet your goals more efficiently?  According to HubSpot’s State of Inbound report, companies that track their inbound marketing are 17x more likely to see a positive ROI than companies without good analytics in place. However only 57.7 percent of Google Ads accounts actually have tracking set up for their site and campaigns. 97 percent of accounts without proper analytics set up fail.

Companies have neither the time nor the know-how to leverage data the right way when strategizing and executing PPC campaigns.

Google provides a wealth of data, but it’s often cumbersome to mine through it and generate actionable insights. Skipping this step, though, will taint your strategy, minimize your results and ultimately lead to an inefficient use of budget.

For example, according to Seer, it can take up to 250 hours to evaluate 6,000 search queries manually. It’s extremely tedious, as you have to export out search terms and keywords in excel, manually review them, and then optimize your ads (sometimes you have hundreds or even thousands of rows filtered by clicks and cost). Marketers often fall prey to the misconception that by following Google’s recommendations and SMART Bidding, they are automatically optimizing their accounts. They might notice a wasted click at $0.83 cents and not think too much about it. But, what happens if there are 20 clicks at $0.83? Google doesn’t need any more money, so stop giving it to them!

We have a solution.

&Marketing’s Analytics team will estimate how much of your monthly budget you are spending on irrelevant or low-performing keywords. Our calculator isn’t an exact science, but it does give you a solid estimate of how much money you could be saving, as well as the number of clicks and conversions you might be missing out on. 

Success Story: We recovered nearly 20 percent of one client’s budget!

A current client of ours – the leading supplier of Pool & Spa inventory and retail software services – engaged us to complete a Market Analysis to understand their current paid search efforts and how they could be optimized. Through this process, we:

• Discovered that 19 percent of their budget was wasted on expensive, low-performing keywords
• Re-allocated that spend to higher-performing keywords 
• Saw a 446 percent increase in conversions and a 93 percent lower cost per click

Want an even deeper dive into your PPC account? We’re offering a FREE comprehensive PPC audit!

For a more in-depth look, take advantage of our free PPC audit. Contact us to learn more.