Where the Money Goes on a Bad Campaign

The report that matters

Every advertising platform can show what people actually typed before clicking your ad.

That is different from the keywords you chose, sometimes very different, and it is where the waste is visible.

Reading it for the first time is uncomfortable, because a proportion of the spend will have gone on searches nobody would have chosen.

It is also the single most productive half hour available in any account, and most small advertisers have never opened it.

The usual patterns

• Job seekers, searching for employment in your trade.
• People wanting to do it themselves, searching for how to.
• Students and researchers, looking for definitions.
• Free or cheap, from people who will not pay your rates.
• Wrong service, adjacent to yours but not what you do.
• Wrong location, despite the targeting.

The first is the most consistently wasteful for trades. Searches containing jobs, careers, vacancies, apprenticeship or salary all cost the same as a genuine enquiry and produce nothing.

Negative keywords

The mechanism for excluding searches you do not want, and it is free.

Adding a term as a negative means your ad will not show for searches containing it.

A starting list for most trades: jobs, careers, vacancy, salary, apprenticeship, course, training, how to, DIY, free, cheap, and the names of any large competitors.

Then add to it monthly from the search terms report, which is the part that keeps it working.

A well-maintained negative list is frequently the difference between a campaign that is marginal and one that works, and it costs only attention.

A worked example

A trade business three months into a campaign, spending steadily and receiving few enquiries.

The search terms report showed that a substantial share of clicks came from searches containing jobs or apprenticeship.

A further share came from a neighbouring city they did not serve, because the location setting was targeting people interested in the area rather than located in it.

And a number came from searches for a related service they had never offered.

Adding negatives and correcting the location setting removed roughly a third of the spend and almost none of the enquiries.

The campaign became viable at the same budget, entirely by not buying things they never wanted.

Location settings

The setting most often left on a default that does not mean what people assume.

Platforms distinguish between people located in an area and people showing interest in it, and the default frequently includes both.

Which means somebody in another province researching your city sees your ad, clicks it, and costs you money.

For a local trade the correct setting is almost always people physically in the area, and changing it is one dropdown.

Also worth checking the radius, since a default radius around a city centre may extend well past where you would travel.

Devices

A setting worth checking, since performance frequently differs sharply by device.

Most local service advertising performs better on phones, because the searches are immediate and the phone number is one tap away.

Some businesses see the reverse, particularly where the purchase is considered and people research on a desktop before enquiring.

The report will tell you which applies to you, and adjusting the bid by device concentrates the spend where it converts.

What is worth checking first is whether the site works properly on the device that is converting worst, since that is frequently the whole explanation.

Match types

How loosely a keyword is matched to a search, and it decides how much irrelevant traffic arrives.

Broad matching shows your ad for anything the platform considers related, which is a wide interpretation and produces the most waste.

Tighter matching restricts to the phrase or something close to it.

For a small budget, tighter is almost always better, because the money buys fewer and more relevant clicks.

Broad matching suits large budgets with the volume to sort signal from noise, which is not the situation most small businesses are in.

Time and day

A source of waste that is invisible in the search terms report.

Clicks arriving at two in the morning, or on a Sunday, when nobody will answer the phone for two days.

For a business whose main conversion is a phone call, an ad shown when the phone is unanswered is buying a click with a much lower chance of becoming anything.

Restricting the hours to when somebody answers concentrates the same budget into the periods that convert, which for a small budget is a meaningful improvement.

The exception is emergency work, where the out-of-hours click is the valuable one, and the restriction should run the other way.

The counter-case

Where apparently wasteful clicks are not.

Searches slightly outside your usual service that you could do and had not thought to advertise, which the report occasionally reveals as a genuine opportunity.

Research-stage searches in a considered purchase, where somebody looking up how something works today may enquire in three months. That is real and it is easy to over-claim.

And a neighbouring town you would travel to for a large enough job, where the click is worth having occasionally.

The distinction is whether you would take the work if it arrived. If the answer is no, it is waste, and if it is sometimes, the targeting needs a decision rather than a default.

Who is clicking more than once

A smaller source of waste worth knowing about.

Repeated clicks from the same source, whether from a curious competitor, an automated tool, or somebody clicking several times in a session.

Platforms filter obvious invalid activity automatically and refund it, and the filtering is not perfect.

What is worth doing rather than worrying: setting a frequency limit where the platform allows, and excluding your own network address so that internal viewing does not cost anything.

Beyond that, click fraud is a subject with more anxiety attached than it usually merits at small budgets, and the search terms report will produce far more savings than chasing it.

The monthly half hour

1. Open the search terms report.
2. Read every term that cost anything.
3. Add negatives for anything you would not want.
4. Check the location setting is physical presence.
5. Check the radius.
6. Note anything surprising that might be an opportunity.

The second is the whole exercise, and doing it monthly for the first three months removes most of the waste a campaign is ever likely to accumulate.

What the budget needs to be for any of this to matter is covered in a budget too small to learn anything.

Frequently asked questions

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