When it comes to Google Ads, making the most of your budget should be a priority. Working with PPC campaigns in and out each day, at Conteur our main focus is to optimise for the best performance possible within your budget – allowing you to get the maximum return on your ad spend.

While it’s best to do these things before you get started, they can still be applied to poor-performing campaigns.

Keyword research

The most effective way to ensure the success of your keywords is by starting with keyword research. We find that lots of businesses often guess the keywords that their customers are using to find them, but keyword research provides tangible data to back this up, as well as multiple alternatives that you may not have thought of or considered.

Using Google’s Keyword Planner Tool gives historical information such as average monthly search volume, keyword bid ranges, and even ad group suggestions, so using the data when researching keywords is key.

Beyond the initial setup, it’s also very important to keep on top of your keywords on an ongoing basis. That means adding negative keywords, using the Search Terms report to find new keywords, and reviewing competitor keywords too.

Choosing the right keyword match type

Keyword match types exist for businesses to specify how closely-matched their keywords should be to a user’s search query.

From least strict to most strict, the options include:

• Broad match
• Broad match modifier
• Phrase match
• Exact match.

Google’s default for keywords is ‘broad match’ which means that your keywords will trigger searches that include misspellings, synonyms, related searches, and other relevant variations of the keyword. BM keywords are brilliant at driving lots of impressions but may deliver low-quality or less qualified traffic to your website.

Example: men’s blue trainers

Broad match modifier (or BMM) keywords specify to Google that you only want to show ads when all three of these words get used in the search term. This limits the impressions available as it’s stricter, but your keywords and ads should more closely match your user’s search term, improving click-through and conversion rates.

Example: +men’s +blue +trainers

Phrase match keywords will only appear when the full phrase is used in the search term, and any close variations. In this example, this keyword would trigger ads for searches such as ‘Buy women’s red jacket online’.

Example: “men’s blue trainers”

Exact match keywords are the most limiting version of keywords, and will only show your ads for that exact term and very close variations.

Example: [men’s blue trainers]

Review your Google ads budget

Finally, low budgets and low max CPC (cost per click) bids can cause issues with Google Ads accounts. A £100 a month spend on a campaign only gives you £3.29 a day — although this sounds reasonable, depending on your sector and the level of competition within it, this may deliver as little as one-click a day. Some super-competitive and high CPC industries include: marketing, copywriting, legal services, consumer services, and technology keywords. So in these cases, £3.29 might not be enough to even gain one click per day.

Similarly, it’s important to make sure that all of your keywords have high enough bids that you can outbid the competition – the best bid for each keyword will vary based on the competition within your industry, so it’s important to check on this regularly, and look for any keywords with the status ‘below first page bid’ or ‘below top of page bid’. To conclude, using the right keywords, bids and match types can be critical to the performance of your campaigns. If you don’t know where to start, contact our PPC experts at today.