- 1. Minus-words and minus-phrases
- 2. Automatic recommendations by Google Ads
- 3. Targeting options
- 4. The budget for advertising campaigns
- 5. Placement places in a KMC
Everyone makes mistakes in their work. A PPC specialist is no exception. After analyzing my own experience, I made a selection of mistakes that I myself have once made.
Let’s discuss each of them in more detail.
1. Minus-words and minus-phrases
When I first started working at PPC, I used to forget to add the minus-words to my ads, and I used to cancel them as well.
We use minus-words to turn off ads for non-targeted requests, but it’s also important to cancel them. Google Ads understands the word form for keywords, but minus-words need to be worked out. It takes a long time to do it manually, but there are many services on the Internet that will do it instantly (for a long time we have been using the Russian services, but we hope that soon there will be their Ukrainian analogues).
2. Automatic recommendations by Google Ads
For more than a year Google Ads gives recommendations for optimizing advertising campaigns. It is also possible to configure the automatic application of these recommendations.
By default automatic application is disabled, but it is not unreasonable to check it:
Fig. 1 – How to check whether automatic application of recommendations is on
The only recommendation that can be enabled for automatic application is the removal of conflicting minus-words (if a key phrase has a word mentioned in the minus-words, Google will remove it from the list).
Fig. 2 – How to enable automatic use of the recommendation “Removal of conflicting minus-words”
In addition, you need to constantly check what recommendations Google gives you – especially if someone has access to the account.
A real story from my practice:
I had one client with admin access, and no sooner had I rejected recommendations that weren’t needed than he accepted them all. Because of the history of changes, you can’t undo everything, and that includes expanding the keyword list. I had to check all the keywords and stop the unnecessary ones (and there were several thousand words added in broad compliance). Google added those keyword phrases that were similar in meaning and content to those in the account. In fact, they were phrases that were not relevant to the client’s business in any way. And then I still had to check the search terms, because ad impressions were included, so it was not an hour’s work).
3. Targeting options
In addition to the standard type of targeting – city, region, country – there are several other options that can be configured. They look like this by default:
Fig. 3 – Additional geotargeting options in Google Ads
But there is a nuance here: for example, your business is food delivery, you work only in Kiev, set up targeting for Kiev and targeting options left as on the chest above. After your ads have worked for some time, you look at the statistics and see that your ads are not only shown in Kiev, but also in other cities, and maybe in other countries, and yet there were clicks for which you paid money.
This is all because you have a target: “People who are and are interested in your targeting. That is, someone from Lviv entered in the search “food delivery in Kiev”, he was shown your advertising, he clicked on it. Therefore, it is better to choose the option of targeting “presence: people who are or regularly visit.
4. The budget for advertising campaigns
When working with other people’s funds, you should always be careful with their intended use. If a client sets a certain monthly monetary limit for advertising, you need to divide that amount by the number of days in the month and the number of campaigns in your account. Then you run your ads and see that Google spends more money than you set it, sometimes it’s twice as much, and so on several days in a row. But this is nothing to be afraid of. Google may spend more than the set daily budget, but within the monthly budget. That is, it will optimize advertising so that at the end of the month you have the amount of spending that was budgeted at first.
5. Placement places in a KMC
If you have a KMS campaign, you should definitely check the places of advertising, that is, the sites on which it is displayed. KMS gives a lot of traffic, especially this traffic gives mobile applications, which you constantly exclude from displays, because usually this traffic is not targeted. But in order not to play with cleaning sites all the time, it is better to turn off the display on all mobile applications at once.
The easiest thing to do is to create a list of excluded placements:
Fig. 4 – Lists of excluded locations
Fig. 5 – How to create a list of placements to exclude
Fig. 6 – Creating a list
Exclude all apps at once:
- enter mobileappcategory::69500 in the “Specify multiple placements” line;
- click on “Add 1 placement”.
You can then use this list for all campaigns in the KMC.
Fig. 7 – How to exclude all applications at once
Google doesn’t stand still and is constantly evolving. Almost every day additional tools for managing contextual advertising appear, and some become obsolete. So it’s important to keep up with current trends and not be afraid to make a mistake when trying out any update or testing any new hypothesis. The main thing is that you have to determine whether it is reasonable to do it, so there is no additional cost for your client.
Let’s develop Ukrainian internet marketing together!
Everything will be Ukraine!
