Latest / Marketing Made Simple with Fexingo: Branding, SEO, and Digital Strategy for Beginners / Why Your Google Ads Are Burning Cash
Transcript
- Lucas: So you set up your first Google Ads campaign. You picked some keywords, wrote a couple of ad copies, set a daily budget. And now you are spending money but not seeing sales. Sound familiar? Luna: It is the number one complaint I hear from small business owners. 'I am paying for clicks but nobody is buying.' Lucas: Right. And nine times out of ten, the problem is not the ad creative or the landing page. It is the keywords you are bidding on. Most beginners start with broad match thinking they will capture more traffic, but they end up burning budget on searches that will never convert. Luna: Let's break that down. What exactly is broad match and why is it dangerous? Lucas: Broad match means Google will show your ad for any search term it considers related to your keyword. If you are a plumber in Austin and you bid on 'plumber' with broad match, your ad could show for someone searching 'how to fix a leaky faucet' — okay, maybe that works — but also for 'plumber salary' or 'plumber costume'. Those are informational or completely unrelated searches. You pay for the click, and the person has zero intention of hiring you. Luna: So the click costs you maybe two, three dollars, and you get nothing back. That adds up fast. Lucas: Exactly. A client of mine — a local bakery in Portland — came to me last year. They were spending about twelve hundred dollars a month on Google Ads. They were getting a ton of clicks, like three hundred a month, but only two or three orders. Their cost per conversion was over four hundred dollars. Luna: Ouch. For a bakery that is brutal. Lucas: We pulled their search terms report. Turns out they were showing up for 'cake recipes', 'gluten free bakery near me' — that one was okay — but also 'bakery jobs Portland' and 'what is a croissant'. Those people never intended to buy a cake. They were browsers or job seekers. Luna: So what did you do? Switch to exact match? Lucas: We restructured the whole account. We kept broad match but added a massive list of negative keywords — terms like 'recipe', 'jobs', 'salary', 'how to'. That alone cut out about forty percent of wasted spend. Then we created a separate campaign using exact match for their highest-intent terms: 'birthday cake Portland delivery', 'custom wedding cake Portland', 'cupcake order Portland'. Exact match means the search has to match that phrase pretty closely, so the clicks are almost all buyers. Luna: And the results? Lucas: Within a month their cost per lead dropped from over four hundred dollars to about sixty. They were still spending the same budget, but now they were getting twenty orders instead of two or three. The key was understanding intent. Luna: Intent is everything. There is a big difference between someone who types 'how to bake a cake' and someone who types 'order cake near me'. One is learning, one is buying. Lucas: Right. And Google gives you tools to separate those. The search terms report is the most underused feature in Google Ads. Most beginners never look at it. They just set their keywords and hope for the best. But that report tells you exactly what people typed to see your ad. You can add the irrelevant ones as negative keywords and double down on the good ones. Luna: So for someone listening who is about to launch their first campaign, what is the single most important thing to get right? Lucas: Start with a tight list of ten to fifteen exact match keywords that directly describe what you sell and include a purchase intent modifier. For a bakery, that could be 'buy chocolate cake online', 'delivery cupcakes', 'custom cake order'. Then set broad match on a separate campaign with a very low budget — like five dollars a day — just to discover new search terms. Review the search terms report every week and move the winners to your exact match campaign. Luna: So you use broad match as a research tool, not your main driver. Lucas: Exactly. And the second thing is quality score. Google gives each keyword a score from one to ten based on expected click-through rate, ad relevance, and landing page experience. A higher quality score means you pay less per click and your ads show in better positions. Luna: So if your ad is relevant and your landing page matches what the user searched for, you get a discount. Lucas: Pretty much. If your quality score is a six or seven, you might pay two dollars per click. But if you get it up to a nine or ten, that same click could cost you eighty cents. That's a huge difference when you are scaling. Luna: How do you improve quality score? Beyond matching keywords. Lucas: Number one: make sure your ad copy includes the keyword. If you are bidding on 'vegan cupcakes Portland', your headline should say something like 'Vegan Cupcakes Portland — Order Online'. Number two: send people to a page that is specifically about vegan cupcakes, not your homepage. Google wants to see that the landing page has the same topic as the ad. Luna: So you need a dedicated landing page for each main keyword group. Lucas: If you can. Even a simple page with a photo, a description, and a buy button works better than a generic home page. The bakery we worked on had one landing page per product category — birthday cakes, cupcakes, cookies. That small change boosted their quality score from an average of five to an average of eight. Luna: And their cost per click dropped. Lucas: By about thirty percent. So the lesson is: don't just set and forget. Google Ads rewards relevance. The more specific you are, the less you pay and the better your results. Luna: I think a lot of people are intimidated by the dashboard. There are so many settings and metrics. Lucas: It can be overwhelming. But you really only need to focus on a few things: click-through rate, cost per conversion, and quality score. Ignore impressions and average position for now. Those are vanity metrics. Luna: So what is a good click-through rate for search ads? Lucas: It varies by industry, but for search ads on Google, the average across all industries is about three to five percent. If you are below two percent, your ad relevance is probably low or your keyword match is too broad. If you are above ten percent, you are doing something right. Luna: And cost per conversion? What should a small business aim for? Lucas: That depends entirely on your profit margin. If you sell a fifty-dollar product with a forty percent margin, you cannot afford a thirty-dollar cost per conversion. You need to be under ten dollars to make it work. So know your numbers before you start spending. Luna: That is a good rule of thumb. Never spend more to acquire a customer than the profit you will make from that customer. Lucas: Exactly. And one more thing: use conversion tracking. So many small businesses run Google Ads without setting up conversion tracking. They have no idea which keywords actually led to sales. You are flying blind. Luna: Okay, so to recap: start with exact match on high-intent keywords, use broad match as a discovery tool, add negative keywords regularly, improve quality score with relevant ads and landing pages, and track conversions. Lucas: You've got it. And if you do those things, you can turn Google Ads from a money pit into a reliable customer acquisition channel. Luna: I think that bakery example really drives it home. They were ready to give up on ads entirely, and a few structural changes turned everything around. Lucas: It happens more often than you think. Most people are just one search terms report away from a profitable campaign. Luna: Alright, next time we will talk about display advertising and whether those banner ads actually work. Lucas: Spoiler: they work, but only if you target the right audience. We will get into it.