Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is one of the most effective strategies for marketing businesses, building brands and promoting products. However, the cost of PPC campaigns can quickly mount up, leaving some businesses with huge advertising costs that can eat up the revenue earned from the campaign. Finding simple ways to reduce the cost of your pay-per-click advertising is crucial to its success.
1- Analyse Past Performance
Most PPC advertising platforms allow you to export and analyse data from past and current marketing campaigns, giving you the opportunity to assess the performance of specific keywords, landing pages and other elements. You can also compare the data for different devices, such as mobiles, to give you a better understanding of your audience. Focus on data from the last three to six months, as trends change quickly, which means that older data will be less relevant.
2- Consider User Search Terms
Choosing the right keywords and phrases is a crucial part of any marketing strategy, so it’s important to consider the search terms that will be used by your target audience. Try to be as specific as possible when choosing key phrases relevant to your business. Adding negative keywords can also significantly reduce the cost of your PPC campaigns, as all searches with the negative keyword will be ignored. For example, if you are aiming at the top end of the market and want to charge a premium for your products, you can choose to ignore search terms with words like free or cheap.
3- Narrow Your Focus
Most advertising platforms provide extras or enhanced tools to help narrow your focus and target a specific audience. For example, geo targeting can be extremely useful for local business searches, as it enables you to choose only searches performed within a specific location. Platforms like Google AdWords also enable you to narrow the timing of the searches. For example, you can turn off your advertisements outside of regular business hours. Another useful tool is the ability to choose only specific devices for displaying your ads.
4- Optimise Your Bids
Bidding on the right keywords is another important aspect of PPC campaigns. Using your past marketing data to analyse the performance of particular keywords is crucial for choosing the best search terms. Remember that some keywords can have a high click through rate (CTR), but a low conversion rate, so it’s important to be thorough when analysing your data. Place the higher bids on keywords with the most conversions.
5- Prepare Your Website
The best PPC ads in the world will be useless, unless you have taken the time to optimise your website and prepare effective landing pages for new visitors. Each advertisement should have its own landing page that is targeted at a specific audience. Avoid using your website’s home page or a generic landing page for PPC traffic, as you need to tailor your content to your campaign. Make sure that your site is easy to navigate and can be viewed from a range of different browsers and devices, particularly mobile devices.
In Conclusion…
Pay-per-click advertising is one of the best ways to market your business, but the costs can quickly accumulate. Analysing past performance, considering user search terms, narrowing your focus, optimising your bids and preparing your website will all help to reduce the cost of your PPC campaign.
