7 Ways to Stop Google Ads From Wasting Your PPC Budget

In light of recent antitrust lawsuits and scrutiny over its ad business practices, advertisers are becoming more concerned that Google may be wasting their ad budgets in subtle ways. While Google provides a powerful platform for targeting customers, savvy advertisers need to be vigilant to ensure they are getting true value from their ad spend.

With Google controlling the auction dynamics and having full access to advertisers’ account data, it has the means and potential incentive to make advertisers spend more than required.

Advertisers should be aware of areas where Google Ads may subtly lead to inflated spending and take steps to optimize their accounts accordingly. Here are seven causes of inflated ad spend and ways to address the issue.

How Google May Lead Advertisers to Overspend

There are several ways Google encourages advertisers to spend more than intended or extract higher revenues from accounts, such as:

1. Using Broad Match Without Negative Keywords

One of the most powerful targeting capabilities of Google Ads is the ability to use Broad Match keywords. This allows your ad to show up for a wide range of searches related to your keywords, even if the query doesn’t contain the exact keyword.

However, some of these searches could be for more competitive terms that result in much higher cost-per-click (CPC) than expected. Other search terms may be less relevant and while costing less per click, may return poor ROAS due to lower conversion rates.

The solution is to set up a robust list of negative keywords to exclude any searches that are not highly relevant or fail to convert at justified CPCs. Otherwise, a Broad Match keyword that normally costs $1 per click could trigger ads for $5 clicks, quickly inflating your costs.

Optmyzr’s Keyword Lasso, Negative Keyword Finder, and its many prebuilt strategies for Rule Engine can all help advertisers more effectively manage keyword targeting.

Recommended Reading: Our recent study of 2637 Google Ads accounts to determine the impact of keyword match types and Smart Bidding strategies. It’s Broad Match vs. Exact Match and Target CPA vs. Target ROAS.

2. Using Broad Match Without Smart Bidding

When employing a Broad Match approach, it’s best practice to enable Smart Bidding strategies like Target CPA or Target ROAS. With Broad Match, an ad can appear for a wide range of searches with different expected conversion rates. Smart Bidding leverages Google’s machine learning to determine the optimal bid for each variation based on your targets.?

For example, it may bid $5 for a commercial query that’s more likely to convert, versus $0.50 for a low-intent query seeking only information. This automatically adjusts bids based on the search to help control CPCs to keep CPA and ROAS within your targets.

By pairing Broad Match and Smart Bidding, advertisers can capitalize on Google’s reach while controlling spending. The combination provides expanded exposure at optimized CPCs tailored to each search query.

3. Changing Budgets Too Frequently

Google will cap your total monthly ad spend based on the daily budgets you set multiplied by the average number of days in a month. If you frequently change your daily budgets, the system will add up all those temporary budget levels over the month.

Google may also overdeliver on any day because it expects traffic on other days to be lower.

There are good reasons why advertisers may change budgets frequently — for example, in response to short-term offers, or changes in inventory and the accompanying changes in spend prioritization.

This means your actual monthly spend could far exceed the level you intended. And knowing how much you may be on the hook for can get very confusing when you change budgets throughout the month.

It is recommended that advertisers use automated tools like Optmyzr’s budget management features to ensure that Google doesn’t exceed your true budget. For example, by optimizing budgets throughout the month, while resting assured that campaigns will be paused for the remainder of a budget period when your ad budget has been exhausted.

Tools like Optmyzr even allow you to deploy flighted budgets that are not bound to the first and last days of a calendar month.

For 4 more ways Google Ads may be wasting your budget, and tips to optimize your PPC, keep reading on the Optmyzr blog.