How to Reduce Google Ads Costs Without Losing Conversions

Negative keywords are the single most effective way to reduce wasted spend. They prevent your ads from appearing for irrelevant searches — searches where someone clicks your ad but has no intention of converting.

Start by reviewing your Search Terms report in Google Ads. Look for queries that triggered your ads but aren't relevant to your business. Common categories to exclude include:

• Informational queries — "what is", "how to", "definition" (unless you're targeting top-of-funnel)
• Job seekers — "jobs", "careers", "salary", "hiring"
• Freebie seekers — "free", "cheap", "discount code"
• Competitor brands — unless you're deliberately running competitor campaigns
• Irrelevant locations — cities or countries you don't serve

Review your search terms weekly for the first month, then fortnightly. A well-maintained negative keyword list can reduce wasted spend by 15-25% on its own.

Quality Score directly affects how much you pay per click. A keyword with a Quality Score of 10 can cost up to 50% less per click than the same keyword with a Quality Score of 5. Google rewards relevance with lower costs.

Quality Score is determined by three factors:

• Expected click-through rate — write compelling ad copy that matches search intent
• Ad relevance — ensure your ad copy closely matches the keywords in each ad group
• Landing page experience — send users to a page that's relevant, fast, and mobile-friendly

Focus on tightly themed ad groups with 5-15 closely related keywords, and ensure each ad group has dedicated ad copy that mirrors the language searchers use. A Google Ads audit can identify your lowest Quality Score keywords and prioritise improvements.

Not every hour of the day converts equally. If you're a B2B business, clicks at 2am on a Saturday are unlikely to generate leads. Yet many advertisers run ads 24/7 at the same bid.

Analyse your conversion data by day of week and hour of day. Then create an ad schedule that:

• Increases bids during high-converting hours (e.g., +20% during business hours)
• Decreases bids during low-converting periods (e.g., -50% overnight)
• Pauses ads entirely during hours with zero historical conversions

You need at least 30 days of conversion data to make statistically meaningful scheduling decisions. Don't over-optimise too early.

Desktop, mobile, and tablet traffic often convert at dramatically different rates. If your mobile conversion rate is half your desktop rate, you're overpaying for mobile clicks at the same bid.

Check your campaign performance by device in the Devices tab. Apply bid adjustments to reflect the actual value of each device:

• If mobile converts at half the rate of desktop, apply a -30% to -50% mobile bid adjustment
• If tablet traffic barely converts, consider a -70% or even -100% adjustment
• If mobile actually outperforms desktop (common for local services), increase mobile bids

Review device performance monthly and adjust accordingly. Seasonal changes can shift device behaviour significantly.

Geographic targeting is one of the most overlooked cost reduction levers. Many advertisers target the entire UK when their customers are concentrated in specific regions — or worse, they're accidentally showing ads to users outside their service area.

Key geographic optimisations:

• Check your location settings — ensure you're targeting people in your target locations, not just people "interested in" them (Google's default includes both)
• Review the Locations report — identify regions with high spend but low conversions and reduce bids or exclude them
• Use location bid adjustments — bid higher in postcodes or cities that convert well and lower in areas that don't

For service businesses with defined coverage areas, tight geographic targeting alone can reduce costs by 10-20%.

Broad match keywords cast the widest net but also trigger the most irrelevant searches. If you're running predominantly broad match, you're likely paying for clicks that have little to do with your offering.

A practical approach to match type refinement:

• Start with phrase match — it offers a good balance between reach and relevance
• Use exact match for high-value terms — your top-converting keywords deserve the tightest control
• Reserve broad match for discovery campaigns — only with Smart Bidding and robust negative keyword lists
• Review search terms regularly — match type refinement is an ongoing process, not a one-off task

Moving from broad to phrase match on your core keywords typically reduces irrelevant clicks by 30-50%.

A better landing page reduces costs in two ways: it improves Quality Score (lowering your CPC) and it increases conversion rate (lowering your cost per conversion). Double benefit.

Landing page optimisation priorities:

• Page speed — aim for under 3 seconds on mobile. Every additional second increases bounce rate by roughly 20%
• Message match — your landing page headline should mirror the ad copy and search intent
• Clear call to action — one primary CTA above the fold, not buried at the bottom
• Social proof — reviews, testimonials, and trust signals near the CTA
• Mobile experience — test on actual devices, not just Chrome DevTools

Even a 1-point Quality Score improvement across your top keywords can meaningfully reduce your average CPC.

You can't reduce costs effectively if your data is wrong. Broken or inflated conversion tracking leads to bad decisions — you end up scaling keywords that don't actually convert and pausing ones that do.

Common conversion tracking issues:

• Counting page views as conversions — only track actions that have genuine business value
• Duplicate conversions — a single form submission shouldn't count multiple times
• Missing conversions — phone calls, offline sales, and cross-device conversions often go untracked
• No conversion value — without values, Smart Bidding can't distinguish a high-value lead from a low-value one

A thorough Google Ads audit will identify tracking gaps that may be distorting your cost data and leading to poor optimisation decisions.

RLSA lets you adjust bids or tailor ads for people who have already visited your website. These users convert at 2-3x the rate of cold traffic, making them far more cost-effective to target.

Two ways to use RLSA to reduce costs:

• Bid adjustments — increase bids for past visitors on your existing campaigns. They're more likely to convert, so a higher CPC still delivers a lower cost per conversion
• Targeting only — create campaigns that only show to past visitors. This lets you bid on broader, cheaper keywords that would be too expensive for cold traffic

RLSA requires a minimum audience size of 1,000 users, so it's most effective for sites with decent traffic volume. Combine it with audience segmentation — bid higher for users who visited pricing pages vs. those who only saw your homepage.

Google Ads scripts let you automate repetitive optimisation tasks that would otherwise eat into your time or go undone. They're free, built into Google Ads, and can run on a schedule.

Useful scripts for cost reduction:

• Anomaly detection — get alerted when spend spikes abnormally or CPC jumps unexpectedly
• Broken URL checker — automatically pause ads that point to 404 pages (you're paying for clicks to dead pages)
• N-gram analysis — identify patterns in search terms to find negative keyword opportunities you'd miss manually
• Quality Score tracker — monitor QS changes over time and flag drops before they inflate costs
• Budget pacing — prevent campaigns from overspending early in the month

You don't need to write scripts from scratch. Google provides a library of pre-built scripts, and most PPC agencies (including our team) can implement custom scripts as part of account management.