For the love of god, stop the leads, please!!!!
If you’re getting overwhelmed with too many leads coming in, you might be tempted to pause your Google ads campaign for a few days while you catch up.
You’re likely thinking “can I just unpause them when I’m ready to ramp-up and get leads flooding in again?”.
Sort of you can, but you also can’t….
I’m going to have to stop here though, and not to sell you anything.
We need to pause for a minute because if you’re having this problem, this might just be a symptom of a much bigger ad spend issue:
You might be bleeding money, actually
Before we get into what will happen if you pause a campaign that is working well, we need to understand negative keywords. If this term is new to you, and you’re running Google ads, I’m about to save you a truckload of cash.
In a situation where you’re getting overwhelmed with leads coming in, and especially if you notice a lot of those leads end up being junk, your keyword targeting might be too broad. The good news is you can tighten it up a lot and get better quality leads overall.
Let’s say you run a car dealership but you only sell four-wheel drive trucks, and they’re all purple.
If you start an ad campaign targeting ‘trucks’ in your area, you’ll get a LOT of traffic.
The problem will be, the majority of that traffic is not looking for four-wheel drive trucks in the color purple.
7 year old Timmy is looking for Monster Truck videos, and your ad popped up and he clicked on it on accident. You just paid for it.
35 year old Winston is looking for truck lift kits because he owns a truck that he wants to modify. Your ad popped up, and you just paid for his click as well.
17 year old skater boy is looking for skateboard truck replacements. (truck is the term for the metal bracket on a skateboard which holds the wheels together on the board.)
You see how quickly you can just burn cash with Google ads?
This can be solved by entering negative keywords. Under the keywords category of your campaign, simply go to ‘search terms’ section. There, you will find a list of all of the terms people searched for which triggered your add to be shown to them.
Review this list on a regular basis and take note of any words people are using which are not related to what you actually offer.
In the above search examples, you’ll see the search terms those three fictitious individuals used.
You’ll probably find that Timmy searched for “cool monster truck videos”.
Winston searched for “truck lift kits” .
Skater boys search for “durable skateboard trucks”.
And unfortunately, your add showed for all of those searches.
This data is gold.
Now simply go into your negative keywords section, and enter the following words:
-monster
-lift
-skateboard
-board
This way, anyone ever searching for truck along with any one of those words listed here as negative keywords, will not be showing your add, and that means you won’t pay for the click.
Okay, so thanks for letting me go on that little rant. I hope you learned something there, and if I helped you save some cash, send me a note – I’m glad to hear any positive feedback.
Now back to our regularly scheduled programming:
If you pause your ads, they won’t come on at the same rate
Any kind of pausing and restarting of your Google ads is going to cause a delay, and a slow restart.
Someone might have told you Google ads are like a faucet, and you can just turn it up or down as you like.
There’s some truth to that.
But it’s going to take at minimum a few hours, and at maximum a few days or weeks to get back to seeing things humming along well again.
If you start up a new campaign, you’ll notice you’ll get a few leads the first day or so, and as time goes on the ads optimize for traffic and begin to work better and better.
That’s why a lot of people are tempted to hit the pause button when they are getting overwhelmed with too many calls or too many leads flooding their inbox.
The same sort of slow start is what can happen if you pause a campaign for too long.
Instead of pausing
The better thing to do, is hold it out for the day, and reduce your budget on the campaign so that’s tomorrow it isn’t showing your add as frequent.
Or you could edit your ad schedule so that ads only run during certain times of the day. Side note: if you’re advertising across multiple time zones, you may want to break your ad groups out so that each run on their own time schedule in those time zones.
