5 Ways You’re Losing Money in Google Ads (Without Even Knowing It!)

Google Ads are a fantastic way to get in front of your target audience when they need it. There are plenty of controls you can use to tailor your efforts, but even for some seasoned marketers there are plenty of ways you can inadvertently spend your advertising dollars in ways that aren’t profitable.

There are several virtually silent budget stealers within the Google Ads system that you may not even be aware of. In this article, I want to walk you through the most common areas where I see advertisers losing money on Google Ads so that you can cut through the clutter and focus your budget on the users that matter to you.

Content

1. Accidental opt-in to the Google Display Network
2. Search partner network performance is not checked
3. Ignoring device performance
4. Bid on low volume, non-converting keywords
5. Not taking advantage of negative keywords

5 Ways You’re Losing Money in Google Ads (+How to Fix It!)

Let’s dive deeper into the five biggest ways you’re wasting money in Google Ads – and what to do instead.

1. Accidental inclusion in the Google Display Network

Whenever you launch a Google Ads search campaignyour ads are eligible to appear when anyone searches for anything on Google. But beyond that, there are two other networks where your ads can appear. Depending on the industry you are in and the keywords you usethese networks can be of very low performance and high cost. There is one Google Display Network.

Whenever you set up a Google Ads campaign, you have the option to opt-in to the Google Display Network in your campaign settings. Google checks this box by default, which means your ads will appear in positions on the Google Display Network that are relevant to your keywords.

In 99 out of 100 cases, the performance I see when a search campaign is included in the Display Network is quite poor. There may be some accounts where this option works well, but I say categorically “No”.

If you’re interested in running your ads on the Google Display Network, there are many other ways you can incorporate this into your account strategy, which will give you much more control and better performance than using it as an add-on to a search campaign .

Turn this off. Save your money. Get better performance elsewhere.

🛑 Want to see all the potential places you’re wasting money on Google Ads? Find out with a free, instant audit >> Google Ads Performance Grader

2. Not checking performance on the search partner network

Another network available via Google search is Search Partner Network. Unlike the Google Display Network, the Search Network can work really well for some businesses and campaigns, but not so well for others.

Like the Display Network, the Search Network will automatically be checked in your campaign settings for each new campaign you build on Google Ads. For almost every new campaign I create, I leave search partners enabled and let performance tell me if it’s a good fit for this account or not.

After my campaigns have been running for a while, I go to the Campaigns tab, click on Segment, and then select Network from the drop-down menu. As you can see in the image above, it allows you to see the performance of the campaigns broken by Google search and the search network. Depending on the performance I see here, I’ll either leave my campaign on the search partner network or go back into my campaign settings and turn it off.

This change is not something I usually implement blindly for all campaigns. It is very common for one campaign or a few campaigns to perform well on the search partner network, while other campaigns in the same account perform terribly on the search partner network.

3. Ignoring device performance

Although most companies I work with seem to have their act together when it comes to this landing pages and user experience on mobile devices, this does not mean that some categories and devices do not perform drastically worse than others. When I review the account to look for wasted ad spend, one place I still tend to find inefficient ad spend is across device categories.

To view your device’s performance with the greatest precision, go to the “When and where ads appeared” report, then click “Devices” in the top menu.

In some cases, mobile devices simply don’t convert as well as desktop devices. In other cases, tablets have high search volume but no conversions associated with them. In accounts that are focused on initiating phone callswe find that mobile performance looks very good, but sometimes desktop or computer performance is lacking.

Depending on bid strategy use in your search campaign, you may have the opportunity to optimize your campaign to get performance from those device categories.

If you’re using manual bidding or Target CPA, you can set different goals or bid modifiers based on each device category.

If you’re using other bidding strategies such as up conversion or up conversion value, you have the option to exclude a device category by adding a -100% bid modifier, but you won’t be able to maintain volume through that device category with an augmentative goal. In that scenario, you need to decide if the performance for that device category is so bad that you’d rather not get any traffic from it, or if you need to make some changes to your campaign settings so that you can see incrementally better performance on those devices.

⚡️ Is your Google Ads account set up for success? Download now >> The last Google Ads account structure guide you’ll ever need

4. Bidding on low-volume, non-converting keywords

One area of ​​common Google Ads waste that goes almost unnoticed comes from keywords that don’t make big enough waves to be viewed regularly. More often than not, account managers will review a keyword’s performance for the last week, two weeks, month, or maybe even a two-month period. But they never look beyond that.

If you have keywords that only spend a few dollars a day or a week, especially if you have a bigger budget, you may not notice that keyword spend increasing over time.

Occasionally, it’s important to review keywords for longer time frames than the recent one or two months. Looking back at the last quarter, the last six months, or even last year’s data, one can discover any number of keywords that have slowly eroded little by little, adding up to a much larger amount without much oversight and nothing in return.

🔎 Need help finding the right keywords? Try ours Free Keyword Tool!

5. Not taking advantage of negative keywords

Negative keywords prevent your ads from showing how someone searches for a specific keyword or phrase in their search query. These can be applied to individual ad groups, campaigns or at the account level. If you want to know more about negative keywords in Google Ads, you can read this article here. For now, let’s focus on the reason.

Unfortunately, in the last few years, Google has expanded the way match types workand now they match more and more queries than before. Exact is no longer accurate, a phrase is no longer a phrase, and broad…well…don’t get me started on broad at all.

Without negative keywords, you’re missing out on an opportunity to refine the search queries for which your ads appear. While your keywords may technically match the query, negative keywords allow you to filter out those that do not suit your business.

If you’re running ads on the Google Search Network, it’s imperative that you review yours search query report relatively often to make sure you’re not advertising completely irrelevant terms. The Search Terms report is located in the Insights and Reporting section under Search Terms.

It is extremely easy to add negative keywords to block their irrelevant queries directly from this report. Simply check the box next to the search term you want to exclude, click Add as negative keyword in the blue bar at the top, then set an ad group campaign-level keyword or negative keyword list that makes sense for your account .

I personally like to take this process a step further and every few months or every quarter I like to run what is called N-Gram analysis on my account. N-Gram analysis allows you to see how individual words or short phrases behave in your search queries without having to look at many different rows of data.

For example, if I want to know how all queries containing the word free in my account are performing, I can use N-Gram analysis and look at the performance for the single word “phone” and compare that to my account’s performance goal.

Based on what I find, I can add “phone” as a negative keyword, take no action, or add keywords to my account that contain “phone” if it performs better than my account performance goal.

The same process can be performed with two-word phrases, three-word phrases, or longer phrases, depending on what you’re trying to find out about your search query. To learn the procedure for performing N-gram analysis, you can use this resource.

Don’t waste your precious money on Google Ads!

This covers only the most common ways we see wasted ad spend in Google Ads accounts. Don’t worry, there are more. We hope this list gives you a great place to start looking to trim the fat in your Google Ads accounts. If you need help increasing your Google Ads budget and results, reach for the demo!