How to Reduce and Control Your PPC Campaign Costs
The guest tip is by Andrew Morris
Reducing your AdWords PPC campaign costs (as well as proper pay per click management) is crucial to ensuring you meet your conversion objectives. Cost control occurs at multiple levels in your campaign. There are a handful of manual adjustments that you can make to trim campaign costs. In addition, certain software tools—including bid management ones, in particular—can automatically control keyword costs. A search engine marketing company can really benefit from this concept.
It’s important to first inspect costs at the campaign level. If you are displaying ads on both Google’s search and content networks, ensure that you have one campaign targeting just search, and a duplicate one targeting just content. This will allow you to control budgets and modify ad group and keyword bids for each network independently. Also, for content campaigns, I strongly recommend using site and category exclusions to preserve your click dollars by preventing your ads from appearing on irrelevant sites or categories of web pages.
Next, analyze your brand and top-performing keywords and adjust those bids as necessary. Also, adding different query match types of existing keywords, especially ones that are costly or with high CPAs, allows you to set unique bids for each match type.
Check the Quality Scores of your keywords. Pause those terms with Quality Scores of four or less and having zero conversions. In addition to affecting a keyword’s cost per click (CPC) and first page bid estimate, Quality Score will influence your ad ranking and the keyword’s eligibility to enter the ad auction.
However, when you’re working with not just hundreds but thousands or hundreds of thousands of keywords, you need some automation to help you control and manage the costs of all those long-tail terms. Here are several [mostly] bid management tools that can help you to accomplish this:
- Acquisio SEARCH. Included in the Acquisio SEARCH platform is a powerful, rules-based campaign and bid management module. Among other things, the tool shows you which keywords should be paused, emails you when keywords have poor Quality Scores, and allows you to set maximum CPCs aligned with a dynamic expression like first page bid estimate.
- Clickable. Clickable’s ActEngine analyzes your campaign and automatically generates performance recommendations, namely, in the form of proposing bid increases on effective keywords, reducing bids of underperforming keywords, or notifying you of terms that have fallen below their first page estimates.
- DoubleClick DART Search. The automated bid management tool included in DART Search can bid on your keywords up to 12 times a day. It allows you to create a bid strategy by choosing two rules to be applied in a particular order. Bid rules include those based on position, ROI, etc.
- Omniture SearchCenter. Part of the Omniture Online Marketing Suite of applications, the SearchCenter automated bid engine offers the usual bid management tactics, including, rules-based and portfolio. Day-parting is another feature offered by SearchCenter, however, most modern PPC engines already provide this.
- Podium adCore. This bid management algorithm can adjust bids at the keyword- and ad group-levels, as well as help you test different ad creatives. There’s also a keyword cleanup feature for removing terms with click-through rates below a certain percentage, or having CPAs above a predefined value.
Even with automation tools at your disposal, regularly scheduled, hands-on management of campaign costs remains a necessity. Trimming fat from your campaigns—in addition to doing things like adding negative keywords or testing new ad copy and landing pages—should be an integral part of your regular account maintenance. The above cost-reducing methods and automation tools should keep your PPC campaigns lean, and in line with your conversion goals.
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21 Responses to “How to Reduce and Control Your PPC Campaign Costs”
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Reducing and controlling PPC cost (from dailyseotip)
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Hi Andrew,
Nice tip. Prioritization and campaign organization is a key here as well. You want to be sure to structure campaigns and Ad Groups so that you can quickly navigate your account, easily focus on the areas driving the most spend, and then drill down into those areas to trim fat and improve performance.
Good stuff,
Tom
nice tips In the list building process, this combination of Adsense income and an opt-in form on the same page, can overall help reduce or even neutralize the cost of getting targeted visitors thanks.
Its very interesting and informative post. Its very worthy to read this post.thanks for sharing this info.
Helpful information about reduce ppc campaign costs. Thanks for sharing good tools.
great post Reducing and managing your AdWords pay per click (PPC) campaign costs is crucial to ensuring you meet your conversion objectives thanks for sharing.
I manage ppc campaign and learning this is important to me. Thank you so much!
A good technique is to have the keyword in the ad that best positions your ad, so you can decrease the bid amount
its very worthy to read this post.thanks for sharing this info.thanks.
Quality Score will influence your ad ranking and the keyword’s eligibility to enter the ad auction nice post thanks.
If I want to hire a firm to manage my PPC ads on Google and Yahoo, how much will they charge to manage an advertising budget of say 1000 dollars a month?
Interesting article with some very useful tips. Cheers for sharing.
Did you see the prices for those tools?
If I were selling motor cars, or millions of widgets – but how can the little guy justify the cost of those tools?
This is partly a rhetorical question and partly an information question. Some guidance here would be useful.
A good technique is to have the keyword in the ad that best positions your ad, so you can decrease the bid amount. great thanks
Many thanks for pointing out the automation tools.
I was thinking about getting a freelancer to assist me with my campaigns, to do things like these tools you mentioned do. I was kind of worried about letting see my keyword list and other sensitive information.
Thanks once again
Some excellent PPC advice indeed, summed up well. Thank you for those resources too…
Excellency over perfection: leader at chat
Good informative post for ppc. I getting many new tools for ppc campaign and helpful information for that.
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The address of new friendships, thank you
The address of new friendships, thank you