Owners of small and medium-sized businesses often face a dilemma: to invest the last of their money in advertising or to give up promotion altogether. But even with a small budget it is possible to get clients and sales. The main thing is not to “drain” money on useless clicks, but to work point by point. We have collected 7 strategies that will help you squeeze the most out of every penny. And yes, this is not theory – all points are tested on dozens of campaigns.
Kill junk queries. Cleaning checklist
The first rule of saving money: stop paying for people who will never buy. For example, those who search for “free templates” or “download instructions”. Such queries are a black hole for the budget.
What to do
- Add anything unnecessary to the minus phrases.
- Turn off autotargeting on Search.
- Exclude generic queries where the intent to buy is implicit (a child’s bike for a girl is too generic, don’t take it. Take a children’s bike for a girl to buy in the online store/delivery/brand/model).
- Check the phrase report by the type of matching display ad. You need to raise the bid per click or clean up queries until the ads match phrase match rather than semantic match.
- For products – write the title in the product card and description as accurately as possible – so the system can more accurately select the audience for display when setting up product ads.
Expert feature
Run a search report for a month to 3 months and sort your queries by number of impressions. Remove anything that is not related to your product. This way you will save up to 30% of your budget tomorrow.
Narrow your geography and time. Work only with your target audience
Why pay for displays in regions where you do not have delivery? Or for clicks at 3 am when your manager is asleep and the client needs it urgently?
Example:
A cafe in Moscow ran advertising throughout the city, but 80% of orders were in the Prospekt Mira metro area. We narrowed the targeting to 3 km around the cafe – the traffic dropped, but the conversion rate doubled.
What to do
- Disable advanced geotargeting in Yandex Direct.
- Specify the hours of operation and days when your audience is active (for example, from 9:00 to 21:00 for B2B).
- Disable displays in non-core cities.
Expert trick.
Use call-tracking data. If calls are only coming in between 12:00pm and 6:00pm, trim the morning and evening shows.
Bid on the long tail. Less competition,lower price.
Requests of 1-2 words (“buy a sofa”) are expensive and often untargeted. But long phrases (“buy a corner sofa in Moscow inexpensively with delivery”) are cheaper and attract those ready to buy.
Example:
Repair studio reduced the budget by 40%, shifting the focus from “interior design” to “interior design of the apartment 50 square meters turnkey”. There are fewer clients, but each one is targeted.
What to do
- Collect long tails via Yandex Wordstat or Google Keyword Planner.
- Use the questions: “how to choose…”, “where to order…”, “how much does it cost…”.
Improve landing pages. Even perfect traffic won’t save a bad landing page
If the user clicks on the ad, but leaves after 5 seconds – you pay for empty transitions.
Checklist for testing a landing page
- There is a clear offer valuable to a specific audience and it is duplicated in ads and on the first screen of the site?
- Is there a clear call to action (“Order”, “Get a discount”)?
- Does the page load in 3 seconds?
- Phone number or form in a prominent place?
Expert tip.
Add trust triggers to your site: testimonials, delivery times, guarantees. For example: “We’ll deliver in 2 hours, or we’ll refund 100%”.
Micro-testing ads. Even small edits yield +20% in conversions
Many people start with large campaigns in all areas at once and get the classic “budget drain”. Instead, run small test campaigns of 5-7 keywords each. This will allow you to collect valuable data without spending a lot of money.
You can’t rely on one version of text. Which works better, “10% off” or “free shipping”? Test this through A/B tests.
How to do it
- Create 2-3 variations of ads with different headlines.
- Run them at the same time.
- After a week, turn off the losers and scale the successful ones.
Place
a tender for free
Our system will find you the contractors for services related to website or application development, search engine optimization, contextual advertising, marketing, SMM and PR.
Example:
An online store increased conversion rates by 25% by replacing “Cheap Items” with “Items up to 50% off”.
Carefully segment your audience, filter out unnecessary traffic
Forget the “machine gun” approach of showing ads to everyone. Instead, brainstorm and clearly define exactly who your ideal customer is. For example, if you are selling cafe equipment, don’t waste money on targeting housewives or office workers.
Some users click on everything but never buy. They can be weeded out:
- Add in minus words: “cheap”, “promotion”, “sale” (if you don’t have real discounts).
- Set up exceptions for audiences: for example, disable shows for those who have already visited the site, but did not leave a request.
Do not let the campaign go to waste. Weekly analytics and redistribution
Contextual advertising is not “set it and forget it”. Check once a week:
- Which queries are eating up your budget.
- What ads aren’t getting clicked.
- Which pages “sell” the worst.
Analyze the results weekly and reallocate your budget. If a certain group of ads is performing better than others – give it more funds. Don’t be afraid to completely disable campaigns that aren’t working.
Expert Chip
Use summary tables in Excel. Sort the data by cost per bid and turn off anything above your profitability threshold.
Keep it simple. Start small.
These strategies don’t take millions or a year to implement. Start by cleaning up your queries, adding minus phrases, and setting up geotargeting – it takes a couple hours, but will cut costs immediately.
If it seems like you don’t have the energy to figure it out on your own, outsource the task to us. You can leave a request atfree audit of your advertising campaign. We will find hidden holes in the budget and make a checklist of fixes – all you have to do is make money.
P.S.
Remember: even perfect customization is no substitute for expertise. Sometimes it’s easier to trust advertising to those who know how to avoid pitfalls.
