Audited my Google Ads campaigns today and found out most of my ad spend was going to completely irrelevant traffic. I'm running vertical campaigns for an AI SaaS product, and th...
Today, while auditing my Google Ads campaigns, I stumbled upon a costly oversight: a significant portion of my ad spend was being misallocated to irrelevant traffic. I'm currently managing vertical campaigns for an AI SaaS product, and the search terms report painted a harsh picture of inefficiency.
The issue stemmed primarily from broad match keywords. These were attracting searches that had little to no relevance to my product, such as competitor brand names, users searching for free tools, students hunting for research materials, and individuals with no buying intent whatsoever. For instance, my "fraud detection" campaign was drawing clicks from queries like "fraudgpt free" and "scamalytics ip check." Meanwhile, the content moderation campaign was spending on terms like "hive moderation" and "grok bypass moderation." Clearly, these users were not in the market for what I was offering.
To address this, I integrated negative keywords across all five active campaigns. This strategy involved categorizing and blocking three main types of irrelevant searches:
If someone searches for "hive moderation" or "ipqualityscore," they want that specific tool, not yours. Block them.
1. Competitor brand names: These included keywords like "hive moderation" and "ipqualityscore." Individuals searching for these terms were seeking out those specific tools, not my product.
2. Freebie and research terms: Words such as "free," "download," "kaggle," "research paper," "dataset," and "course" were clear indicators of students and hobbyists, not potential buyers.
3. Platform-specific irrelevant terms: Each campaign had its own set of unnecessary keywords. For the fraud campaign, terms like "ip score," "ip check," and "credit card fraud" were identified. The moderation campaign needed to filter out "no moderation," "civitai," and "bypass," while the product categorization campaign required exclusions for "woocommerce," "shopify," and "catalog maker."
In addition to adding negative keywords, I made the decision to pause three campaigns that had minimal relevant search volume. This allowed me to concentrate the budget on the two campaigns that actually showed potential for generating meaningful traffic and conversions.
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