Proven PPC strategies that may be wasting your budget

We look at a few proven PPC strategies that are often praised as “best practices,” but that may not always be your best options. Are they wasting your budget?

Let’s take a look:

1) Relying on broad match

When using this option, Google and Microsoft will often match people to unrelated keywords that don’t match up with what they’re looking for.

When to rely on broad match:

a) When combined with RLSA (Remarketing Lists for Search Ads) since you know you’re targeting audiences who expressed an interest.

b) When you’ve maxed out your reach with phrases and exact keywords, you can test broad matching to find new search queries.

2) Auto-accepting Google’s suggestions

Lately Google has released an option that lets advertisers auto-accept all the platform’s suggestions.

The drawback is that you could run into hundreds of keywords being added or ads being created that you didn’t write.

So, while some recommendations can be helpful, it’s important take some time to review suggestions before implementing them.

Doing so blindly will waste a lot of budget.

3) Including a specific number of keywords per ad group

There isn’t a one size fits all solution.

And when deciding how many keywords to include in each ad group, you should consider the following factors:

a) Data significance

Include enough keywords to generate a significant amount of clicks, impressions, and conversions to make optimization decisions.

b) Intent

Group keywords by the intent they target. You can’t put top-of-the-funnel and bottom-of-the-funnel keywords in the same ad group.

c) Close variant

Since close variant is on the rise, separating keywords with the same meaning but different wording isn’t effective.

4) Diversifying into every channel

Diversification is a big word in advertising circles nowadays.

However, before doing that, you should ask yourself the following question:

“Am I investing extra budget into a new channel? Or am I pulling budget from a channel that is already working?”

There’s nothing wrong with riding a wave that’s really working until it works less well and/or it’s simply prudent to diversify your marketing spend across comparably effective channels.

Final word

Some best practices can really just be not best practices at all.

However, you also shouldn’t take everything said here as marketing gospel either.

Before deciding, it’s important to learn about and know all your options.

And before jumping into the lake, test the water with one foot… in fact, just start with your big toe.

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