How to get more value from paid search

To get more value from paid search, you have to first run through a mental checklist of the traffic quality you're currently receiving from your paid efforts.

Even if you're advertising on Google Ads, it doesn't guarantee that your ads are reaching its intended audience.

Double-check the following before diving into ad copy, ppc strategy or campaign types:

• Quality of the leads received in your CRM;

• Locations or countries of those leads;

• Any spam comments in your CRM;

• PPC slick to Google Analytics session ratio (are clicks turning into sessions)

• Irrelevant form fills or jobseekers

• Unique IP addresses or the amount of times the same IP address clicks on your ad

There could be some degree of the above occurring in your account, which can be normal even under the best campaign setups (no algorithm is perfect). However, if it's excessive, you'll have to take the following steps:

How to protect your Google Ads budget

1. Double-check your targeting settings - only market to people in your location and within specific countries (not all countries, which is the default setting)

2. Pause your performance max campaigns - a lot of fraud or rather irrelevant traffic can occur due to click farms on the display network. It’s a good idea to turn off performance max momentarily while you investigate.

3. Increase web form security - if forms are too easily completed it could create a negative feedback loop in your Google account which shows your ads to the wrong users. Use the latest reCAPTCHA version, use SSL and restrict file uploads in webforms.

4. Turn off Google search partners - I’ve found some job applications are present when trying to expand reach with this setting. 

5. Test your conversion tracking - by using the correct conversion tracking settings you’ll be in the best position possible to make automation work for you and not against you.

6. Disavow/cancel illegitimate conversions by uploading them into your Google Ads account.

7. Pause display advertising and programmatic advertising while you audit your website list to see where your ads are actually shown.

8. If you do any display advertising - only use a whitelist of approved domains.

9. Monitor your search terms. Broad match likely triggers a lot of irrelevant queries, however, it has a lot of useful and intelligent features built in so I can’t advise that you turn it off. That really depends on each individual account. Ensure you have thousands of negative keywords applied to your campaign.

10. Segment your Google accounts (each country should have their own). It’s a good idea to contain any issues that may arise within each account. Therefore you absolutely need to have multiple ad accounts when implementing Google Ads across different countries. One bad apple should not spoil the bunch.

11. Contact Google’s Trust & Safety Ad spam team - they’re available to contact through your assigned Google account manager.

12. Request a refund or dispute a charge - it’s more and more difficult these days to get a refund, but it’s definitely worth a try. Gather all available evidence, logs of your website traffic and reach out to Google’s engineers. 

As you can see, there's a lot of monitoring, implementation and testing a PPC marketer needs to do.

PPC marketers need to be constantly monitoring, testing & providing web developer & manager feedback

The larger your advertising spend, the more scrutiny your account should receive in order to get the most value possible from your Google Ads investment.