Have you seen a spooky spike in AdWords spending? If you think that you might have been spending money on AdWords that is just being wasted, you might be starting to get scared of your paid search account. Is it really bringing you the return on investment you should expect from PPC? It’s easy to lose track of your account and then see a huge spike in spending, unless you have already set the strictest possible budget settings.

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It is usually easy to see a spike in spending coming and this spike is often accompanied by more sales, leads, and profits, but sometimes the increase is not as easy to identify. Sometimes it happens so slowly that you do not even notice it. That doesn’t mean, however, that you should just let your spending run rampant. Whether you just want to keep your spending in check or you’re looking for places to slash your spending, you should take a look at your AdWords budget and settings. Here are some of the options you should look at for decreasing your spending:

Location Targeting

Look and see where the majority of the clicks are coming from. Remember, the whole point of pay per click is that you only have to pay for the clicks that you actually get. If you’re paying way more this month than you were last month, it could be because of an increase in clicks. Your numbers might be artificially inflated, however, if you are getting a lot of clicks from locations that are not relevant to your business. While this can happen because of bot traffic, it can also be a result of not using the right settings.

For example, if your ads are set to target people who are in, searching for, or are interested in your targeted location, you will sometimes see clicks from people who are far outside of that targeted region. If you only want to target people that are actually in a specific are, you might want to change your settings to “People in my targeted location.”

“People in, searching for, or who show interest in my targeted location” is the recommended setting, but if you are spending too much money paying for clicks that are way outside of that target area and will likely never be able to take advantage of your offering, you might want to change up your settings to make sure that you are only paying for the clicks that you absolutely want. This will limit your traffic, but for many businesses, it could also streamline the leads that they get.

Ad Scheduling

Part of the issue may be that you want your ads to be live all day, every day, despite the fact that there are some times of the day that none (or, at least, very few) or your target audience is going to be online. For example, if you sell cars, it’s unlikely that the majority of your audience is going to be on in the middle of the night.

How can you tell if you really need your ads to be live 24/7? A good way is to look at the quality of the leads and when they come in. For example, if you are seeing almost no high quality leads on the weekend, you might consider lowering your weekend bids. You’ll save money and your ads will still be live during the most important days of the week.

It’s important, of course, to make sure that you test everything. You should look at your current data, make a change, and then watch your data to see if you really are saving money, without hurt the efficacy of your campaign. Look for times of day or days of the week when there is very little demand. Cut your bids during these times and you probably will save money. While you might not like taking your ads offline during certain times of the day, if you are looking to cut back on ad spending, this is how to do it.

Position Metrics

The position metric has never been the best metric for measuring your performance, as it just provides you with an average of your positions. If you are bouncing between position one and position four, it could be showing you that your average position is number two. That said, there are a few ways that you can use this metric to lower your spending. For example, you should look at device targeting and your average position and change up your campaign based on those numbers.

For example, if you get most of your leads through mobile, you want to be paying more attention to the average position on mobile devices. You should be paying the most attention to the devices that matter the most; those that give you the best leads in the highest quantities. You can lower the bids for devices that are not giving you the performance that you want or need.

If your budget has been steadily sucked dry, look at these three aspects of your campaign and see if there are any tweaks you can make to significantly improve the efficacy of your campaign.