I recently started working with a new B2B client in the payment processing space. Their main complaint about their Google Ads account was that they were driving tons of leads but so many of them were looking for services they didn’t provide or for other specific businesses. They fielded calls all day long that just went nowhere. They couldn’t understand why the leads they were getting through Google were such poor quality if they weren’t bidding on any keywords for those services or businesses.
The first thing I did when I reviewed the account was take a look at the search terms driving clicks. Keywords and search terms are different. The keywords are the phrases you bid on to indicate the type of traffic you want to serve ads for, but search terms are the actual phrases users typed in before clicking on your ad. Keywords can match to a wide variety of search terms, especially when you utilize the broad and phrase match types. So it’s important to see what you’re actually serving ads for to ensure you’re driving quality traffic.
Furthermore, when combined with Google’s automated bidding strategies, driving poor leads can hurt your account even more because Google can’t tell the difference between a strong lead and an irrelevant one. It just sees leads coming in and tries to capture more of those types of users – meaning you’re just doubling down on that poor traffic.
By taking these simple steps, I was able to cut down significantly on poor quality traffic and bad leads, freeing up their budget to go after higher quality traffic and drive leads that actually turned into long-term customers:
- Add negatives for poor quality and irrelevant traffic seen in search terms
- Proactively add negatives for services that are not offered by the advertiser
- Add new keywords to the ad groups on phrase and exact match to drive more traffic for searches you know are relevant
- Improve ad copy by including the top search terms (not keywords) in your titles and descriptions when possible
- Structure ad groups in a way that allows for the most relevant ad copy possible without segmenting so much that you limit data for testing and optimization purposes
In 2 short weeks of working with this account, performance had completely turned around. We had gone from seeing almost no leads with any potential of turning into customers to over 30 per month being categorized as hot leads, of which many later became customers.
If you suspect your account is inadvertently driving poor quality leads and you want help to get more out of your advertising budget, contact Clicks By K today to see how we can help!