How to reduce your AdWords costs
Unless you’re offering a completely unique product, chances are you’re going to find Google AdWords is highly competitive. In order to maximise your return on investment, you’re going to need to find innovative ways to lower your costs per click, whilst still achieving a healthy click-through rate to drive those conversions and maybe look into expert PPC Training if you want to do it yourself.
The difficulty of achieving an affordable yet competitive CPC can vary dependent on your industry, location or products, although there are some general tips and tricks which can be applied across the board, which we’ll take a look at below:
Utilise negative keywords
Want to keep your budget for high quality searches? You need to understand negative keywords. The clue is ultimately in the name – just as you target search phrases relevant to your product, you’ll also want to target specific keywords you don’t want to appear for. For example, let’s imagine you’re the proprietor of an optician's in Newcastle. You might want to rank for the phrase “glasses Newcastle” – the trouble is, the company next door to you might sell glassware, meaning that you’re going to end up wasting clicks from publicans looking for pint glasses. This is where negative keywords come in. By adding the negative keyword “pint glasses Newcastle”, you’re not wasting any valuable clicks on dead end leads.
Opt for long-tail keywords
In competitive industries, costs-per-click can be astronomical. The solution is to do your research and find some high quality long-tail alternatives. Long-tail phrases usually have higher quality scores – for small and medium-sized businesses, this means lowering your CPC while maintaining a consistent conversion rate.
Change your copy
Try to keep your pay per click ads as relevant to your product or service as you can. If your ads aren’t particularly relevant to your keywords, you’re going to experience more unwanted clicks. Try to keep it as simple as you possibly can, but try to offer vibrant content which compels the reader to click.
Schedule ads during peak hours
If you’re running a restaurant which offers a happy hour on a Saturday evening, it might not make sense to run your PPC campaign at 3am on a Monday morning. Think about when your customers are most likely to react and adjust your AdWords campaign to run accordingly.