So, how best to slow my campaigns down? Sure, there are lots lof options; reduce daily budget; come away from content search; even delete keywords or pause adgroups.
All seem to have a down side however and increasing budgets is NOT an option.
What best to do..? Any recommendations?
Syzygy
1. Turn off content match
2. Reduce daily budget.
3. Reduce the bids of keywords with a poor ROI.
You may even want to re-write some ads to put off the more casual users, making your sales/leads more qualified before they reach your site.
There are reasons for bidding on keywords like this, but if your first priority is to reduce total spend, then removing a few of these (or adding negatives/changing these to exact or phrase match from broad) is one of the first steps to slowing down total impressions/cost.
The second is to change all the broad match terms to phrase (or if your bidding on broad and phrase - remove the broad match versions).
Then there is the obvious. Lower cost per clicks, lower positioning, break campaigns into smaller chunks and regulate the pricing, etc etc.
Good Luck
KG
One particular adgroup is running away with itself and eating up too much of the tiny available budgets.
If this is still an important Ad Group to keep, then you might want to consider putting it into it's own campaign, and giving it a budget in line with it's value to you.
Also, maybe set it to show in only those countries which represent your best markets.
And I completely agree with others who have suggested getting rid of (or at least reducing the Max CPC for) the less important (or successful) keywords in the Ad Group.
<added> Oops. Just realized that keywordguru made essentially the same suggestion, worded differently. </added>
AWA
In taking a long hard look at the options it made more sense to actually pause one of the campaigns as well as implement some of the suggestions given.
The month's budget would only have lasted 'til the end of the day so drastic cut-backs needed to be made. Likely I'll have to pause them all tomorrow afternoon until the new month begins!
Just three months ago ctr's were ok, but not overly exciting - things were ticking along quite nicely in many respects. Spending was well under control.
In July I changed most ad groups across all campaigns and experimented with dynamic kw's - with amazing results; the volume of clicks has steadily increased and, as I stated in the earlier post, with the summer season over the number of clicks has just continued to rise and rise, and rise. Problem is the budget hasn't...and I'm only paying min price across everything.
Several kw's in the leading dynamic adgroup went into the G-spot a couple of weeks ago - volume of clicks and ctr's have gone even higher. Now the monthly budget is being spent in a little over two weeks.
Too much success it appears; the hors d' oeuvre that is 'my' financial offering has been devoured and, for this month at least, there are no more crumbs left on the table...
Syzygy
Are all those extra clicks not making you more money? In a good campaign revenue should always be significantly more than the cost of the clicks.
Seems odd you can make a profit over a month from N clicks but not from the same number of clicks in a day. Guess your industry is very different from mine, or your keywords are not the ones you want. Think this is what other are saying too.
Those that click come to our magazines-on-the-web. We don't sell anything to visitors. Our returns come from the long game; the greater the traffic the more it costs advertisers to use our site in order to promote to those very visitors we've paid for to get to come to the site in this instance.
Simply put, it's about driving traffic to our sites, that's all.
Visitors sign up for our various newsletters; the greater the volume here, the more we offer value to advertisers through this, the third revenue stream (traditional advertising being the first; web ad revenue being the second).
We can't increase ad rates (thus short term ROI) based on one months worth of clicks; it has to be the increase in overall traffic & free sign-ups over a period of time; usually a 12 month cycle.
Advertisers see that we are encouraging more people to visit their presence on our site = better results for them = greater repeat business & better opportunities for new business.
Ultimately the frustration is that there isn't enough budget to realise the full potential that adwords is now offering. However, we are a smallish business and spending to accumulate is not a philosophy that traditionally works in this arena; margins in trade publishing are - these days - very tight indeed.
It's Catch 22....
Syzygy
Hey, perhaps I'm just too good at this adwords thing for the company!...;-)
(I too had been wondering why, if you make a profit from 10 clicks, you wouldn't make the same profit x10 for 100 clicks. Your post makes it crystal clear.)
AWA
