Don't Waste Your Digital Marketing Budget
Posted: Thu Dec 05, 2024 7:47 am
Creating your first digital marketing campaigns can be tedious and time consuming, but—more than anything—it can be terrifying. The moment you flip your campaigns live, money begins to flow out of your pocket. If you are not careful, you can spend it too quickly or without a return.
This is why we put together a list of the most important settings to check and consider prior to launching your program. Protect your budget and give your business the best chance of success by going through this checklist before you turn campaigns on.
If you’re already running campaigns, go through this list to see if there are any areas you can reduce wasted spend.
1. Network Settings
Google Search campaigns are built with an opt-out style for their instagram database networks. For a majority of marketers, it is best to initially launch on just the Search Network, and opt out of Google Search Partners as well as the Display Network.
Screenshot of Campaign Settings in Google Ads Manager.
Here is the why.
Best practice is to keep search campaigns running on search networks, and keep display campaigns running on the display network. The audience intent is drastically different, and the ad formats are completely different. Don’t make the mistake of forgetting to opt-out of the Display Network on your search campaigns at launch.
Now for the Search Partners Why. According to Google, Search Partners extends “the reach of Google Search ads to hundreds of non-Google websites, as well as YouTube and other Google sites.” This means your ads can show up on Google Maps and Google Images, but it can also show up on websites like Walmart and Target.
For some brands, Search Partners can be a valuable resource and very profitable, but for others it can be a place of wasted spend with no return. Best practice is to launch a new program or product without Search Partners initially, prove success on the Google Search Network, and then test search partners as a next phase of your program.
There are several strategies to test Search Partners. The first is breaking out campaigns to only target the Google Network or Search Partners. Another is to target both within the same campaign and then segment network performance in your reporting.
2. Location Targeting
Location settings are very straightforward with how you select them within the UI. However, this is one of those “slight differences” situations where it makes a big impact on your spend and performance.
Screenshot of Location settings in the Targeting and audiences section of Google Ads Editor.
Your business might have very specific regions for service availability, product delivery, or relevance. If you are a local business, you want to make sure you are targeting as precise as possible with the Advanced Search options under “Location Options”.
The Advanced Search prompt in the Location Settings of Google Ads Editor.
Here you are able to target by city, postal code, DMA, State, etc. This will help you avoid showing a pizza delivery ad to someone 300 miles away from your business location.
Even if you do target the entire world or large locations, for example the United States and China, those audiences are going to vary and you will want to segment your geo targets at the campaign level to control messaging and budgets separately for each country.
The final thing to consider with location targeting is who to Target and Exclude. Google defaults to “People in, or who show interest in, your targeted locations”. This means that if someone in the UK shows interest in your product or service in your targeted areas of the United States or China (keeping with the example above), then they are eligible for ads.
This is why we put together a list of the most important settings to check and consider prior to launching your program. Protect your budget and give your business the best chance of success by going through this checklist before you turn campaigns on.
If you’re already running campaigns, go through this list to see if there are any areas you can reduce wasted spend.
1. Network Settings
Google Search campaigns are built with an opt-out style for their instagram database networks. For a majority of marketers, it is best to initially launch on just the Search Network, and opt out of Google Search Partners as well as the Display Network.
Screenshot of Campaign Settings in Google Ads Manager.
Here is the why.
Best practice is to keep search campaigns running on search networks, and keep display campaigns running on the display network. The audience intent is drastically different, and the ad formats are completely different. Don’t make the mistake of forgetting to opt-out of the Display Network on your search campaigns at launch.
Now for the Search Partners Why. According to Google, Search Partners extends “the reach of Google Search ads to hundreds of non-Google websites, as well as YouTube and other Google sites.” This means your ads can show up on Google Maps and Google Images, but it can also show up on websites like Walmart and Target.
For some brands, Search Partners can be a valuable resource and very profitable, but for others it can be a place of wasted spend with no return. Best practice is to launch a new program or product without Search Partners initially, prove success on the Google Search Network, and then test search partners as a next phase of your program.
There are several strategies to test Search Partners. The first is breaking out campaigns to only target the Google Network or Search Partners. Another is to target both within the same campaign and then segment network performance in your reporting.
2. Location Targeting
Location settings are very straightforward with how you select them within the UI. However, this is one of those “slight differences” situations where it makes a big impact on your spend and performance.
Screenshot of Location settings in the Targeting and audiences section of Google Ads Editor.
Your business might have very specific regions for service availability, product delivery, or relevance. If you are a local business, you want to make sure you are targeting as precise as possible with the Advanced Search options under “Location Options”.
The Advanced Search prompt in the Location Settings of Google Ads Editor.
Here you are able to target by city, postal code, DMA, State, etc. This will help you avoid showing a pizza delivery ad to someone 300 miles away from your business location.
Even if you do target the entire world or large locations, for example the United States and China, those audiences are going to vary and you will want to segment your geo targets at the campaign level to control messaging and budgets separately for each country.
The final thing to consider with location targeting is who to Target and Exclude. Google defaults to “People in, or who show interest in, your targeted locations”. This means that if someone in the UK shows interest in your product or service in your targeted areas of the United States or China (keeping with the example above), then they are eligible for ads.