This is a great zone to be in - your performance is great but you are just not spending the budget fast enough! It’s time to look for sensible ways to increase spending without wasting money.
Getting this right opens up a wonderful opportunity for client conversations around how you have proactively expanded their advertising efforts in a timely and effective manner.
Yellow
Your performance is great but you’re just not spending enough of the budget. Pretty easy to fix.
Check your highest-performing campaigns and look for opportunities to increase budget on them by checking the impression share of high watermark spend patterns. Always be mindful of gentle increases for campaigns that have budget-sensitive bid strategies. This step alone may solve your budget pacing problem but if not, look to step 2 & 3 below.
Areas to look at for easy expansion opportunities:
This is super quick and can be very effective. Go to your keyword list, set your date range to something that gives meaningful data for your client (we would normally check 90 days as a starting point) and sort by cost. Look for keywords with low CPA or high ROAS, click the selector box next to the keyword then Edit > Change Match Type and add a new keyword with a match type that is one level up from the current keyword’s match type (eg if exact, add a phrase).
Use Google’s Keyword Planner tool (or third-party tools like SEM Rush or Spyfu) to find new keywords that might be valuable to add
If using smart bidding strategies, we recommend increases of 10% at a time.
Look for search terms that have a history of generating conversions but are no longer getting any impressions. Working out the reason for the blockage (and fixing it) can reignite some high-quality traffic. Common causes are negative keywords or keywords/adgroups being paused.
Expand your geographic targeting to include more relevant regions or cities. If your client operates in multiple locations or there are untapped markets, this can help you reach a larger audience and increase ad impressions.
Take advantage of various ad extensions (such as call extensions, sitelink extensions, or structured snippets) to provide additional information and improve your ad’s visibility. This can attract more clicks and increase your ad spend.
Explore different ad formats, such as responsive search ads, image ads, or video ads, to diversify your campaign and reach users in different ways. This can help you increase impressions and spend.
If search partners have been disabled, look at historical performance to see if it was turned off for a reason. If nothing pops out, turn on search partners
Create a close of your current campaign and change the bid strategy. Running both campaigns at once does not create internal competition and drive up click costs – instead, it can open up new audiences that your existing bid strategy was bidding down on or ignoring altogether. Popular pairings are CPA + Max Clicks (with bid ceiling), ROAS + CPA, CPA + Max Conv, ROAS + Max Revenue
Opening up new campaign types and networks can come with a higher level of risk in terms of performance impact, so ease into this one.
Almost always considered low-hanging fruit so it’s a great place to start if they don’t already exist. Look at doing this on Search (using broader keywords than you would normally use), Shopping, and Display.
If you have over 100 conversions at the account level in the last 30 days, you may see this option open up as a bid strategy that’s available for a display campaign. You essentially nominate how much you are prepared to pay Google for each conversion event, and Google will show your ads all over the place until you get a conversion, at which point you pay the amount you nominated. It’s a really low-risk way of getting a load of brand exposure yet guaranteeing that your CPA is where you want it to be. The best of both worlds really!
If you are not already using Microsoft Ads (Bing) then you should be able to set up a sync to copy your best Google campaigns across and immediately start generating more leads and sales at a reasonable cost. Others worth exploring are Meta, Amazon Ads, LinkedIn, Tik Tok.
Test little-used campaign types, such as Discovery or even Smart campaigns (yes, they can actually work well!)
In the next section, we will explain how to manage clients in the BLUE zone, including your downloadable checklist.
