Too many junk clicks!
PicNet had been doing Adwords for about 10 years and were reasonably happy with the results.
But they got a lot of calls from people looking for services they didn’t provide.
How did we fix it?
They needed to stop wasting money on clicks from people looking for services PicNet didn't provide. Then we could spend that money on people who were looking for their services.
Without realising it, PicNet was 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 not actually that easy to stop this from happening.
Google’s keyword match types can be a bit confusing, and Google have 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 are appearing for.
PicNet had been getting clicks for searches like "apple tech support", "foxtel tech support" and many others like this.
In total there were a lot of clicks like this. In fact, 69% of their budget was being spent on clicks from people that had zero chance of buying something.
To fix this problem we had to make changes to their keyword match types, their negative keywords, and also ring-fence certain keywords so we could get more clarity on whether they were keywords we should keep, or throw out.
1. Tighten up those keywords
Writing ads to deter unsuitable people might sound like an obvious strategy, but it actually goes against what many clients and Ads Managers think you should do. A lot of 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 had a chance of buying from PicNet.
So that meant we needed to deter some people from clicking. To do this we:
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explicitly stated “For Medium & Large Businesses” to try to reduce clicks from Ma & Pop stores, and small businesses where someone had spilt coffee on the WiFi router.
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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 prospective client. If they don’t understand this language then they probably won't be looking for PicNet's services. Hopefully these people will see the ad and not really "get it" and hopefully not click, saving us some money.
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. Two months after making changes that figure was down to 11%.
To flip that the other way, 31% of their budget was going to clicks they wanted, and that figure is now up to 89%. That's the equivalent of increasing their budget 2.9 times!