Finding a company on Google’s search engine is often imperative to the reputation and sales potential of a business. More visitors to your company’s website mean more prospects and if you are a bit lucky, that traffic even gets converted to grow customers. Google Ads can help you to make it to search results page number one or appear elsewhere with your ad.
While that was already more or less clear to you all, I wanted to prepare this article to pinpoint two areas where you are very likely wasting your Google Ads campaign’s budget with no effect whatsoever. That’s something worth looking into right? After all, this ad traffic keeps getting more and more expensive and the allocated budget should have the best possible ROI.
Who am I to teach you about Google Ads marketing? Well, as scary as it might be, I figured this out only by being a user and found the solution to the issues only by talking with Google about it on their Twitter account of Google Ads but I want to share this with you. So without any further ado, let’s jump right into it.
1. Your already converted customers keep seeing your ads
Ok, so I signed up for the premium service XYZ by the fantasy company Random Inc. I went for the biggest plan and paid straight for a full year ahead. What a good customer I am, right? And yet, I keep seeing the ads from this company everywhere I go. They pop up in search results. They hit me in apps and games. And they are displayed in random articles when I’m reading the news online as banners in some way.
Even though I am unlikely to click it, it still could happen by accident or maybe because I just want to access the service and I’m too lazy to open a name tab and enter the URL on my own? And even if that person doesn’t click, you’d still pay a little for the ad being displayed. Even though that’s only a small percentage of what a click would have cost you, in masses, this could still account for a large sum of money.
How to fix that
The Google service teams on Twitter are very kind and helpful. They got back to us relatively quickly.
Hi Chris, thanks for reaching out. You can set up an audience that includes existing customers, and then add the list to a campaign's exclusions: https://t.co/B4IGJ5N6pw.
Hope this helps. Do let us know if you have any questions. -Chetan— Google Ads (@GoogleAds) July 24, 2018
So what does that mean in detail? You will need to create an audience list that can be filtered out later. You best put all your existing customers in this list and try to do this in a dynamic way, so you don’t have to redo it over and over again.
This might not address 100% of all your customers seeing your ads and possibly clicking on them but it should address the issue with a strong improvement rate. You can save a lot of money here if you’re running a big online business.
2. Your own employees are eating up your Google Ads budget
This particular risk grows with the size of your company. If you’re a startup or SMB, this might not cause heavy hits on your budget but if we are talking about hundreds or even thousands of people, this could steal some kind and it could be prevented.
Of course, there is no evil intent from your employees to cause any kind of damage, but being on your company’s website and similar websites often could make the Google Adsmachines think that they are potential customers who are interested and ready to buy. When that happens, Google Ads would fire at them from all angles to make sure they convert the hot lead to a new costumer.
How to fix this
A quick an non-technical solution to this could be to inform your staff about this and advising them not to click on any ads for their own company even if it seems interesting. But if you don’t keep doing that, folks will forget and new company joiners will also not have a clue about this being the case.
Hi Chris, thanks for your reply. You can exclude IP addresses at the campaign level so that all ads in that campaign are blocked from computers and networks associated with those addresses- https://t.co/dwrYLdzqGN. Hope this helps. -Anil
— Google Ads (@GoogleAds) July 25, 2018
A better way was explained to me by Google. A good way of filtering out your own company’s employees from your marketing campaign would be to set up a filter to exclude a particular IP-range on the campaign level. You can find a detailed instruction on setting this up here on the official Google support site.
Bear in mind that an IP filter can also cause negative effects if not done properly. You might want to check that together with your IT department just to make sure you’re only blocking your own IP segments and not potential customers.
Still some questions unanswered?
If this didn’t fix your issue or if you have other questions around this, feel free to talk to the Google Ads support team on Twitter or contact them in another way as you might prefer.
Make sure to share your thoughts and any outcomes below in the comments as well. Many thanks and good luck with reducing the waste in your campaign. 😉
Photo credit: The feature image is owned by Google and was provided for press and media useage.
Editorial notice: Google changed the name of their advertising service Google AdWords to Google Ads between the 24th and the 25th of July. We tried to update the article to match the new “Google Ads” branding and hope that we did not overlook a spot. What used to be AdWords is now Google Ads.
