7 ways to get the most out of your money when it comes to PPC campaigns

7 ways to get the most out of your money when it comes to PPC campaigns

When it comes to being competitive on Adwords or other CPC platforms, you need to know what you're doing and when to do it.  You'll need to know what to promote, what industry you're in and what locations to target in order to increase your conversions.

Some niches are much more difficult to crack in to if you don't have a huge budget.  A good example of this is when Injury Lawyers are trying to pull in leads through PPC campaigns.  I did a quick search and found some long tailed keywords that were geo targeted from $20 all the way up to $250 per click!   If you were to get just 10 clicks and pay $250 a click, you're spending $912,500 per year for just 3,650 clicks each year lol.  You'd better hope that you're getting some million dollar cases coming in just to break even.

Now that's an extreme example of how much you could be spending when it comes to a single click, and hopefully you're not in that niche. 

If you are in a competitive niche and don't want to spend a ton of money on a few clicks, here are a few ways you can help reduce your CPC and increase your conversions at the same time.  Basically you'll spend less and get more


1. Adding negative keywords into your campaign
There are a massive amount of business owners who do not use negative keywords within their campaigns, and they should be.  This is basically a blacklist of keywords you don't want your ad showing for.  I used the law niche as an example in the beginning, so I'll stick with it lol.

If you're a lawyer who only does injury law, you won't want people coming to your website if they just got a felony for burglary and need a lawyer.  You wouldn't be able to help them with their case since you're an injury lawyer, not a criminal lawyer.  If you're not adding negative keywords to your campaigns, you will likely get people to your website who won't need to spend money on your website. 

Adding negative keywords will keep people off of your website who weren't looking for exactly what you are offering or selling, which saves you a lot of money from clicks that will never benefit you.  Well that is if they guy or girl who did the burglary didn't steal a car and crash into a tree, hurting themselves in the process lol.  Even then they probably would still need a criminal lawyer to keep them out of prison


2. Always be creating new ads for testing purposes
You will never truly know what your best ad is if you're not trying to split test.  Whenever I run an ad campaign I will start with a minimum of 10 different ads per campaign.  I will monitor them while they're running and see which ones are performing the best.  The losers will be removed and the winners will keep winning. 

I don't stop there though, I will also add in a couple new ads each weeks and let them run with the winners.  I will then filter out the losers and keep the winners, and sometimes the previous winners become the losers because I used a similar ad model from that first ad in the new ads.  Basically I'm perfecting my ads by filtering out the losers and duplicating the winners but making them even better than the original   Over time you will have the best ads for your campaign and you won't have to add many more.  It's still a good idea to add a new one every week or two to see if trends are changing.


3. Make your ads extremely relevant to what you're offering
When your ad is pretty blanketed for your entire niche, you won't see as much success as you should be.  This is due to people just clicking through your ad because it has a possibility of being the thing they're looking for.  When I was running an SEO services campaign, I had a bad ad up that said something within it along the lines of "We can help optimize your design" and I learned really quick not to do that.  This is because people were contacting me for web design off of my SEO services ad.  Now if I didn't have a web design service, I would have been sh*t out of luck because I was wasting money on clicks by people who weren't interested in what I was offering, but I did have a design service and I was able to still convert a lot of them lol. 

My case isn't the same for a lot of people though.  If you're not getting extremely relevant with your ads, you won't get the clicks you need and you'll just be wasting money.


4. Tweak your landing pages
Your landing page design and content has a big role in your PPC campaign.  Sure you can send traffic right to your homepage and hope to get a sale, but it doesn't always happen.  You will need to take you time and set up some landing pages for specific services and run ads just for them.

On these landing pages you will be able to target specific keywords, not your entire list, and this will increase your relevancy score while simultaneously decreasing your CPC because your website is extremely related to the keywords you're targeting.


5. Target every match type and filter
A lot of people are just targeting the broad match keywords because that's the default setting, usually.  You will need to target exact match and partial match as well in order to figure out what works best for your campaign.  A broad match campaign will show your ad for any keyword related to your list of keywords, so you could be showing up on pages that you shouldn't and then getting clicks that will never convert.

Imagine if those law firms spending $200+ per click didn't have good targeting and were just wasting money?  They would have to fire a lot of people to make up for thier losses.  Instead they usually hire someone like myself to come in and manage everything in order to reduce the spending and increase the conversions.  Sometimes they get mad because after I start, they aren't getting the same amount of clicks as before, but after about a month they realize that they are spending much less and making a lot more with their campaigns because of what I did lol


6. Increase your quality score
Your quality score is like an average of everything above.  If you can increase it, you're ads will show up more often for your targeted keywords and you will pay less per click when someone does click the winning ad   Your ad will be scored between 1 and 10.  I like to tell clients that I target a 6 or higher in the beginning and then we work on everything to increase the score as close to 10 as possible.  Now getting to a 10 isn't impossible, but it's not the easiest thing if you're targeting a lot of keywords. 

Increasing your quality score simply means your ad is working really well and is extremely relevant to what you're showing up for and what you're targeting.  Getting that 10 is what your main goal is, but don't get discouraged if you start off lower than that.  I've had campaigns start at 1 and 2 but got up to a 10 with a day of work.  Yes, it can take some time to tweak everything and get the 10, but would you rather be spending 3x the amount per click or use up 1 day to edit everything for the better?  


7. Lowering your bids manually
When you have everything working well, you will need to start manually lowering your bids so that you're not spending too much.  Sure you might lose some traffic, but you'll save a ton of money.  There's no guarantee that Google or other platforms will lower your CPC after you improve your quality score, have the best ad for your website, have the best targeting, etc.  So play it safe and lower your bids manually so that you don't spend more money than you have to.

Normally you can keep your traffic at the same levels after you lower your CPC and having everything setting up perfect.  I normally recommend lowering your bids by just 10% and letting it sit for a few days.  If your traffic doesn't drop and you're still getting the same amount of clicks, lower it 10% more and watch it again for a few days.  Do this until you see your traffic drop slightly and then increase it 10% just to be safe



In Conclusion:
The above is a pretty good list of what you need to do when it comes to running a PPC campaign and getting the lowest CPC possible while keeping your traffic high.  You will mess some things up in the beginning, but you will learn over time.  Stick with it, put the work in and you will start to see the light at the end of the tunnel soon enough   Hopefully that light has a bunch of money waiting for you because you're now spending the same amount but converting a lot more of you clicks


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Thanks!

Razzy