Ads running perfectly. Same amount of clicks, half the price. Incredible.
A garden centre in Oxfordshire came to guy.digital with a problem. They are spending more than they’d like on their PPC campaigns and didn’t know how to optimise their campaign to meet their goals.
The total monthly cost was around £2000 per month (some months, a bit more, some a bit less) and they wanted to reduce that to a maximum spend of £1500 per month. They also had some concerning stats with less than 0.5% click through rate and a CPC (cost per click) of nearly £2.
The target for guy.digital was simple - reduce cost by at least £500 per month but retain the clicks to the website.
Recognising the Problems
The first job was to recognise the campaigns that were spending a lot of their budget and why this was the case - was it because it was performing well or simply the CPC (cost per click) cost was too high? I then reduced bids which, in turn, reduces CPC and overall spend on the campaign.
Capitalising on the Strong Performers
Then, I looked at which campaigns were doing well already. Identifying this is simple. Measure your ROI based on cost per conversion or (if you do not have conversion tracking set up / are a service based business) click through rate. I optimised these to use some budget that was previously being spent elsewhere
Optimising the Campaigns
Looking deeper in to each campaign, I recognised that there were no negative keywords set up and that some keywords had auto bids set up, which were overspending massively. Reducing these bids and setting up negative keywords was the first step to the process of optimisation.
Step 2 was looking at the time of day and which days the campaigns were optimised for. For most of the campaigns, we were running out of budget very quickly - usually before 2pm meaning we would not be seen after this time. There was also no optimisation of which days would be prioritised in terms of spend. Being a garden centre and Café, most would visit during the weekend and, with location based ads, I knew it was important to have budget during the day at weekends - particularly Saturday which was when they were open for the longest. Weekdays were also important for the demographics of the retired (age 65+) as they would provide majority of the revenue at the location during the week. However, we also had to keep in mind the research phase, so while we would spend most of our budget during the day and mostly at weekends, we needed to remember that people are likely to research garden centres during their evenings. It was a tricky balance.
These optimisations were not likely to bring the spend down, but target better meaning the money we were spending was more beneficial and we would see an increase in our key KPIs of Click-through rate (CTR), Cost Per Click (CPC) and clicks on our ads.
Reducing the Spend
We gathered some data for the next couple of weeks to make sure our optimisations had worked and we were in a position where we can get correct data to start reducing the spend.
I recognised that while we were using our budget up very quickly on our campaigns, thus missing out on lots of opportunity, with the optimisations in place we could actually reduce the daily spend which would reduce our monthly spend, getting us closer to that goal.
A lot of the reductions came from individual keyword bids being reduced from the Max CPC and changes in strategy, manually setting the CPC rather than letting Google decide.
Finally, we took advantage of the Christmas period and closures of the garden centre to save a few pennies, heavily reducing campaigns spends during the closures!
Ready to find out more?
Find out how I can help you reduce your PPC spend today and get a free audit of your Google Adwords account
Awesome post! Keep up the great work! 🙂