Hi,

Given the turbulent financial climate at present, I thought I'd share a few tips for reducing pay per click spend that have worked well for our clients.

1. Relevance - By focusing in on your best converting keywords you can cut down on the amount you spend on those which don't bring in as much business. Using Google Analytics is a free and easy way to do this.
2. Keyword Matching - In Google Adwords there are 3 keyword matching options; broad, phrase and exact. Using broad matching can lead to you paying for irrelevant traffic.Using a combination of phrase and exact search can cut down on unwanted clicks.
3. Don't strive to be No.1 - Depending on your keywords and phrases, it can cost a lot to be ranked #1. Our own and independent research has shown that ads in positions 3-5 tend to have a better conversion rate.
   
4. Optimise your ads - If you're using Google Adwords there's an option to show your best performing ads more often so you can get the most from your campaign and cut the costs associated with those that have the poorest conversion rates.

The general feeling amongst many of our clients that the competitive nature of PPC is making it too expensive but I feel there are still many ways, like those above that can deliver a positive ROI.

Best Wishes

Andrew Allfrey
e-tail Optimisation Specialist

Thanks for your feedback Mark. However, these tips were written for the benefit of people relatively new to PPC who may be finding things difficult at this particular time.

Blindingly obvious they may be to you, but perhaps not to everyone out there.

Andrew

Just a quick comment in relation to the 'auto optmisation' feature as per:

Optimise your ads - If you're using Google Adwords there's an option to show your best performing ads more often so you can get the most from your campaign and cut the costs associated with those that have the poorest conversion rates.

Google does do this, but it is based on CTR alone so does not pull in conversion data.

More importantly, to effectively split test different ad copy, you have to turn that feature OFF, as you may find Google 'optimising' too quickly. You are better to have 3 different ads and force them to show on an equal basis - that way, you will have real data to base your decisions on.

Relevance should always be the ultimate goal - keep a narrow selection of keywords in each ad group, with a specific ad (or three!) and think carefully about the landing page.

Relevance = positive user journey = happy Google = keep costs down...

We have found PPC to have become more effective in recent months with falling costs, due no doubt to many pulling out.

Joe

My number 1 tip for saving money is:  Clean the keywords.  That is, remove the bad traffic that Google deems relevant on a broad or phrase match.  You will never guess all of these so make sure you have your analytics set to expose them to you.  Selling mobile phones for international use, we bid on the phrases "international phone" and "international phones".  On the singular, people type such as "international phone call to india".  You won't notice this unless you trawl your typed keywords.  It's painstaking but it has 2 big benefits:

1. You stop paying for bad traffic
2. You stop showing for bad searches so your good traffic costs less (better quality score)

If you are not sure how to see these, see this article by Paul Shearing on cleaning broad matches.

A good way to bring down your PPC costs would be to try to patch the holes in your website that are causing people to leave without getting to what they want. If you have a 10,000 PPC visits a month and a conversion rate of 2%. Raising that rate to 2.2% through usability improvments is the same as reducing your PPC visits by 2,000.

The maths is all just an example, but I hope you get the point. Consider plugging the holes in the pipe rather than pushing more water through it.