Cut your PPC costs

Pay Per Click Advertising (PPC) can get expensive on you quickly. Those pennies per click soon become pounds as you move to increasingly competitive keywords. Many businesses, to remain competitive, see their PPC costs creeping higher and higher just to maintain performance.

What can be done? Of course, the best way to cut PPC spend is to get natural search engine results through SEO or become a social media guru…. but here we’re talking about some general tips that can help you run PPC campaigns more effectively.

Every business is different so these are only ideas to consider and test – there is no one-cure-fits-all approach.

1. Create effective landing pages

Every time someone clicks on one of your PPC ads and then bounces from your site, you’re pouring money down the drain. With bounce rates typically around the 25% range, that means a quarter of your PPC spend is wasted.

Effective landing pages that tie-in with the ad and engage visitors are an effective way to get bounce rates down and increase conversions. The cardinal sin in PPC? Having an ad about a specific product/ service just dump a visitor on your website’s homepage!

Think about flow and do everything you can to make the ad -> site -> customer process as smooth and effective as possible. That’s what landing pages do.

2. Laser target your audience

A common cause of ballooning PPC costs is a lack of clear targeting. Many people approach keyword selection with a ‘push’ strategy. That is, thinking about all the words they’d use to describe their business, rather than thinking about what people are actually searching for.

The more you understand about your target audience’s search behaviour, the better you can target your PPC efforts and the lower the cost will be. You’ll waste less on the ‘wrong’ people clicking through and could also uncover less-competitive, but lucrative ‘longtail’ search terms.

3. Don’t think of keyword targeting as a word game

It’s all too easy to fall into the trap of tackling keyword selection like it’s a word game. Effective targeting isn’t about throwing in every homonym, variation and conjugation of your core phrases. Take a step back to consider what actual phrases are being searched for.

4. Cut down on the broad matches

Broad matches are seductive. They lead to much higher impressions and clickthroughs. Not to mention that they can save all that time finding all those exact phrases. But this dragnet approach gets expensive quickly and a lot of those clickthroughs can be from folks you didn’t mean to target.

5. Use negative keywords

Negative keywords are a vital tool in cutting down ‘wasted’ clicks. There are 3 main ways to use negative keywords:

1. To exclude unwanted search terms (obviously!)
2. For targeting when running multiple ad groups
3. To clarify

A common example of excluding an unwanted term is using the negative keyword ‘jobs’ if you want potential customers not employees! If you’re running multiple ad groups you can use negative keywords to refine how you segment your target search terms. Sometimes it’s necessary to clarify a search term through negative keywords. For example, compare “Hand towels” to “Second hand towels”.

6. Concentrate only on SERPs

Google adwords gives you the option of displaying ads on the Google Display Network. This being ads hosted on websites rather than on the Search Engine Results Page. Traffic from these sources can often be ‘low quality’. For example, they could be on job sites or low quality/ inaccurate ‘scraped’ directories.

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Which method will work for you? Well, here’s a bonus tip for you – test. It’s vital for cost-effective PPC campaigns to be continually testing, analysing and tweaking.