Reducing Your Adwords Costs

Adwords is the most popular and most widely used of the PPC networks. The Google network, where paid advertisements appear, offers the greatest exposure because it is the most popular search engine or search portal on the Internet. However, on the flip side of the coin, this also means that there are considerably more companies and websites vying for those coveted advertising positions. It's possible to get carried away attempting to win a bidding war, and find yourself paying over the odds. You should always have a clear maximum bid level set and should not go over this price whatever the situation.

Target Targeted Keywords

The more targeted a keyword, the better the conversion rate. It is also true that targeted, or more specific keywords, usually cost less than their generic counterparts. The more general a keyword is, the more products, services, and websites will be interested in competing for that keyword. This means more people bidding on the keywords, and the higher the price will be. Avoiding these keywords will give you the opportunity to bid lower and attract more active visitors to your pages.

Consider Dropping To Position Two, Three, Etc...

Sometimes there can be a disparate gap in prices between one ad position and the next. It is true that the higher your ad the more clicks you are likely to get, but some keywords demand very high bid prices for top positions. If there is a large gap between the ad position you currently have and one or two positions lower, then consider reducing your bid price to take a drop in prominence. Moving down one or two positions is unlikely to lose you that much traffic and may actually improve your conversion rates.

Qualified Ad Copy

Very general ad copy will generate more clicks. If a person is interested in the topic of your advertisement, but does not fully understand what you are advertising, they will click to find out. This may sound like a good thing, but unless you are offering exactly what they are looking for, they will close your site and go back to the search results to look for a more appropriate site. Deterring comparison shoppers is one of the biggest problems that e-commerce PPC advertisers have.

It is possible to partially qualify ad leads by ensuring that you only serve the ad to people that live in the relevant regions or countries. However, you can also use ad copy that qualifies leads even further. Include specific information that is likely to either attract or deter surfers from clicking the ad. You can consider adding a price range, although this doesn't always yield good results unless you genuinely offer excellent rates.

Increase Your Quality Score

The Quality Score has been established by Google in an attempt to serve higher quality ads to surfers. At the very least, it means that if you have a low quality score you will pay a greater percentage of your maximum bid price. Higher scores attract a lower percentage of the bid price when it comes time to pay your dues. You can view the quality score for each of your campaigns on the campaign management screen. In order to increase your quality score, add a sitemap, add more topically relevant content, and gain more links to that page using topically relevant keywords as anchor text.

How And Why To Reduce Your Adwords Cost

There are many ways to reduce Adwords costs without having too detrimental an effect on the resulting traffic, and it will almost certainly increase your ROI. Taking a drop in position may actually increase your conversion rate, as will ensuring that your advertisements generate qualified and targeted leads. Improving your quality score is good practice anyway, because it helps to improve conversions on your own site and may also assist in gaining a better organic search ranking.