A few months back, Google announced that daily AdWords budgets can spend 2x automatically. This brings up a whole set of issues, but what can you do if your AdWords budget is underspending? For example, let’s say you want to spend around $1,800 each month on a specific campaign, so you set your daily budget to $60. However, as you monitor your account, you notice that your daily spend doesn’t even reach $30 most days.
While underspending your daily budget might not seem like as big of a deal as overspending it, it represents potential lost conversions. So why aren’t you coming closer to $60 a day? Let’s take a look at the factors that go into how much you spend each day.
Bids are too low
One reason you might not be spending your full daily budget in AdWords is that you are bidding too low. In the example below the bid for this specific keyword is performing poorly because it’s bid was set below the suggested first page bid.
So, should you just go through all your keyword and increase them to the bids to what Google suggests? Probably not. Increasing bids on all of your keywords could easily lead you to overspend your daily budget. Instead, you’ll want to increase the bids on a select group of your top performing keywords. It’s also important to keep in mind that $2.29 is just an estimate and these suggestions shouldn’t be followed in every instance. The best thing you can do it regularly monitor your keywords’ performance to determine the optimal bid.
The search volume isn’t there
Even if all of your bids are set high enough to guarantee a slot on the first page, you might still run into issues if the search volume is low.
If a majority of your keywords are showing the message above, it might indicate that your keywords are too specific. If you’re advertising for a very specific product or industry it is possible that users just aren’t searching for you. One way to fix this problem is to play around with different match types. For example, if you have your product’s name as an exact match keyword, you may also want to add it as phrase or broad match. This way your ad will be more likely to show up more often for related searches.
Not enough keywords
If you started off by creating a small set of super specific keywords when you set up your account, it may be time to look into adding more. Now’s the time to start looking for related keywords that might have a slightly higher search volume in order to get your ads more visibility. One way to find more related keywords is to use AdWords’ Keyword Planner. To use the Keyword planner, click the wrench icon in your AdWords account and you should see the link ‘Keyword Planner’ under the ‘Planning’ section of the navigation. In the new window drop down the category titles ‘Search for new keywords using a phrase, website, or category’. In the first box you can input some of your current keywords in order to get a list of related keywords, their average monthly search volume, competition and suggested bid.
Increasing CTR
If you notice that your clickthrough rate is low relative to the amount of impressions that you’re seeing, there may be a disconnect in the keywords and your ad content. In this case you’ll either need to alter the ad content so it is more related to your content or you can add new keywords that are a better fit for the products you’re advertising. You might also want to work on spicing up your ad copy and coming up with better call-to-actions.
AdWords campaigns not living up to your expectations? Try our free AdWords Grader today to see what you should improve!