You might think that the more people hitting your website, the better.  But what if they’re the wrong people?  I’m wanted to share some key techniques for repelling the wrong traffic while warmly welcoming your target customer.

When you first get started in business, a website is usually pretty close to the top of the list of priorities.

And once you’ve got your website, the next step is usually to drive people there.

Whether it’s from your email database, social media or word or mouth, the name of the game is simple: get as many people as possible to your website.

There’s nothing wrong with this approach, but when you start running Google Ads, things change.

All of a sudden, you’re PAYING for a large proportion of your traffic.

When you’re not using Google Ads, sending the wrong people to your website won’t do you any harm.

But when you ARE, it’s the exact opposite.

All of a sudden, every person that clicks your ad and visits your website is costing you money, and if you’ve got no chance of them becoming a customer, you’re just burning through cash.

Which means that when you’re running Google Ads, the name of the game isn’t just MORE traffic.

It’s the RIGHT traffic.  Which means that your ads need to attract the right people while repelling the people who aren’t right for you.

Attract and repel before the ad is even shown

Obviously the more targeted and specific your keywords are, the higher the chances of a good match between what your prospect is searching for and what you’ve got to offer them on your landing page.

Thinking carefully about your keywords and building up a good selection of negative keywords will give you the best chance of ensuring that your ad is relevant for the majority of people who see it.

If you’re not familiar with negative keywords, these are words that – if included in the search term – will stop your ad being shown.

So, say you’re a plumber, and you’re looking to get local plumbing business, you might bid on the keyword ‘plumber near me’.

But by adding words like ‘jobs’ and ‘tools’ to your negative keyword list, you can ensure that your ad doesn’t show for irrelevant searches like ‘plumber jobs near me’ or ‘plumber tools’.

Attract and repel before the ad is clicked

With all that said, it’s nigh on impossible to ensure that your ad is relevant to 100% of the people who see it.

For a start, your negative keyword list should be growing and evolving all the time as you check the search term report on a bi-daily/weekly basis, which means that you’re likely to have some wastage  – that wastage should reduce as you add negatives though.

So, what do you do to prevent the wrong people from clicking your ad when it’s presented to them?

This is where your ad copy comes in.

Let’s go back to the plumbing example – you’re a plumber and you want to try and get new customers who have leaky pipes that need fixing.

You put an ad live with something like ‘fix leaky pipe’ as your keyword, with strict geographical boundaries so that the ad only shows to people in your local area.

However, whether you use broad match or exact match, the chances are that some of the people that use this search term are looking for information on how to fix the pipe themselves.

You don’t want to stop using the keyword, since it’s a good match for the people you DO want to attract, but you do want to make it abundantly clear in your ad copy that clicking through will lead your prospect through to a page that explains your plumbing services, as opposed to a how-to guide on how to repair a leaky pipe.

Using your ad copy in that way attracts the people looking for a plumber, whilst repelling the people who are looking to do it themselves, saving you money on wasted clicks.

Attract and repel using your ad extensions

While the headlines and descriptions on your Google Ad have very strict character limitations, a relatively unknown addition to Google Ads are your ad extensions – these enable you build out your ads further and showcase the different products and services you provide.

This gives your searcher more information about what you do BEFORE they decide whether to click on your ad.

Talking plumbing once again, if your searcher types in ‘plumber near me’, you’re able to show them pretty much every service you offer prior to them clicking on your ad.

This means you can attract the people who are looking for a service you provide (like fixing a leaky pipe), whilst also repelling the people who might have typed that search term but are looking for a different service (like plumbing for a new bathroom build).

And extensions don’t end there either – you can also use the price extensions to attract the right sort of customer and repel the wrong sort.

Price extensions will give the searcher an idea of how much your services will cost, which means that they qualify themselves in or out before they spend your money by clicking your ad.

This is especially useful in industries where there is a big disparity between prices that businesses charge for similar work – if you’re looking to operate in the top or bottom of the market, then you don’t want to attract customers who are looking for the opposite end of the spectrum.

As this has hopefully shown, there is A LOT you can do with Google Ads to reduce wasted clicks, and the more of this you’re able to implement, the greater chance you’ve got of having a profitable Google Ads campaign that helps you grow your business.