Chase wasted clicks, not cheap clicks
Every click costs whatever the auction says it costs, and you only partly control that price. What you do control is who gets to click. A plumber who pays more for a click from someone ready to book beats a plumber paying less for a student researching pipes. Savings that lower your leads are not savings.
Waste tends to hide in four places: searches that are not really yours, locations you do not serve, hours when nobody answers, and extra networks you never chose. Work through them in that order. Each fix is small, but together they often release enough budget to fund more of the clicks that do produce jobs.
Negative keywords: a ten-minute weekly habit
The search terms report lists what people actually typed. Set a repeating reminder, open it every week while the account is young, and add any phrase that cannot become a customer as a negative keyword. It is dull work and it is the quickest saving available, because you stop paying for the same bad search again.
Keep one shared list for the whole account so a lesson learned in one campaign protects the others. Use exact or phrase negatives rather than blunt single words, and never block a phrase like near me or open now, which signal buying intent. If a sudden drop in leads follows a clean-up, check your negatives first.
- Work-seekers: jobs, careers, hiring, apprenticeship, salary
- Do-it-yourself and learning: diy, how to, course, training, tutorial, template
- Freebies and resale: free, used, wholesale, parts only
- Places you do not serve, such as towns outside your service area
- Services you do not offer that sit near your own, like commercial work if you only do residential
Locations: pay only for the places you serve
Set targeting to people who are in or regularly in your area, not people who merely show interest in it. The second option can bill you for someone in another province reading about the Abbotsford tulips. Then open the location report and see which towns actually send enquiries. Drop the ones that never do.
Think in drive times. A tradesperson in Chilliwack may cover Rosedale and Agassiz but not cross the Mission bridge for a small job. Mark those edges clearly, and raise bids for the towns that book at the highest rate. A border-side shop might welcome visitors from Washington state, but most local services should switch them off.
Schedules, devices and networks
Lay your call log beside the ad schedule. If a clinic closes at five and phone leads stop reaching reception, there is little sense in paying for evening calls, although a form request at 9 p.m. can still be worth having. Run ads freely when someone can answer, and trim or lower bids when nobody can.
Check the device breakdown too. Some services get nearly all their enquiries from phones, others from desktops at work. Then look at the network settings on your Search campaigns. Search Partners and Display expansion sometimes send traffic that behaves differently, so test turning them off for a few weeks and compare cost per lead before and after.
Where not to cut
A campaign marked as limited by budget while it produces good leads is not a candidate for cutting. It is a candidate for more money, taken from the campaigns you just trimmed. Resist pausing keywords just because they look expensive; judge them by cost per booked job, which is the only price that counts.
Invalid clicks deserve a sensible response, not panic. Google filters much of this traffic and credits some of it back. Treat sudden spikes from one place or one hour as a prompt to look, and block what you can, but do not blame bots for a campaign whose real problem is its keywords or its page.
Savings that carry into automated bidding
More of Google Ads is run by automated bidding, and automation spends exactly what its inputs suggest. A shared negative list, tight locations and clear schedules are inputs it cannot work out alone. Keep tending them even when the bid strategy is hands-off, because the money you save today becomes the clean data that makes the automation sensible tomorrow.
- 01Shared negative lists carried across every campaign
- 02Location and schedule rules reviewed each season
- 03Cost per booked job used as the main yardstick
Questions & answers
Clicks are priced by an auction, and categories such as trades, dentistry and legal services attract many bidders. Relevance matters too: ads that match the search and a page that fits the ad generally earn better pricing. Look at your cost per lead before deciding the click price is the problem.
Weekly in the first month or two, then every couple of weeks once your negative list has settled. Seasonal businesses should look again whenever demand shifts, because the words customers use change with the weather, the school year and the harvest.
Done carefully, it removes clicks that were never going to call. Done carelessly, it can block real customers. Add phrases that are clearly irrelevant, avoid single common words, and watch lead volume for a week after a large clean-up so you can reverse any mistake quickly.
Work backwards from what a booked job is worth to you and how many enquiries it takes to win one. That tells you what you can afford to pay for a lead. Our free marketing audit includes that arithmetic for your category, with no obligation.
