» Lower Your Ad’s CPC and Still Rank Higher!

For those of you who are spending money to make more money on the internet, this post is for you. I have been reading up on Tyler’s adventure into affiliate marketing. He is currently on Day 10 and has just started optimizing his ad campaigns to lower his costs.

He asks in his latest post:

I’m in the top 10 for it, and paying an average of $1.22 for it now, which is half of what I was paying for it before.

However, I can’t profit if I keep paying that much for it, so I need to find a way to lower it some more, but I don’t really know if that’s possible. What do you guys think about this?

There are many factors that affect the CPC (Cost Per Click) of your keywords on Google AdWords and I will try to focus on a few things that I do to help keep the costs down. While these optimizations are geared towards the AdWords system, they should work for the other two big advertising engines MSN AdCenter and Yahoo Search Marketing (Overture).

Landing Page Quality/Relevancy
Simply put, if you’re advertising for widgets you should be directing people to a page that talks about, and sells widgets. If your landing page is NOT related to your ads, Google will penalize you by increasing the minimum CPC and by raising the CPC so you have to pay more to have your ad ranked high. Just like optimizing your blog or website for search engines, you should be optimizing your landing page to boost the relevancy score of your landing page.

Create separate landing pages for each keyword you are bidding for and try to have the keyword in as many elements of the page as possible without affecting the user experience. Places such as title tags, meta description, meta keywords, title on the page (in between H1 tags preferably), and of course in the copy itself.

Now would be a good time to check out my two part article on building landing pages: How To Create Effective Landing Pages: Part I and How To Create Effective Landing Pages: Part II

Increase Your CTR (Click Through Rate)
Improving your click through rate on your ads will result in a lower average CPC. Is your ad too boring? Is it drawing any attention to itself and standing out from all the other ads? Look to see who is in the top 3 positions and note what is in their ad copy. Unless they’re an advertiser with deep pockets, chances are they have optimized their ads to increase click throughs.

What I find works best to increase CTR on my ads is nothing special, and nothing secretive. You just need to include some sort of call to action in your ad. It is difficult sometimes with only 70 characters of text, but it can be done–I do it on all my ads.

Instead of:
Widgets
The Best Widgets at The
Lowest Prices.
www.widgets.com

Try:
Widgets
Come Try Out Our Widgets
Always The Best Prices
www.widgets.com

Or:
Widgets
The Best Widgets Available
Come Try Them Now!
www.widgets.com

Improve Ad Relevancy To Increase CTR
Another really cool trick that not too many advertisers are using (that I have seen anyway) is creating an ad that the user is looking for. What I mean is, when someone is searching for something on the search engines, they are looking for the best possible match to what they are looking for. So give it to them! Including the keyword into the headline does work a bit, but you can go one step further.

Include the keyword they are searching for into the display url of your ad. This is especially useful if you do not already have the keyword in your domain name:

Example:
Widgets
We’ve Got The Best Widgets
Come Try Them Today!
www.yourwebsite.com/widgets

Or Even: (Not as Clean, but works!)
Widgets
We’ve Got The Best Widgets
Come Try Them Today!
Get_Widgets.yourwebsite.com

Get Rid Of Poor Performing Keywords
If you have a bunch of keywords that have poor CTRs, while most of your keywords are doing good. Remove the poor performing keywords. If you want to try to improve these keywords because they are highly relevant to your site, and nothing seems to be working to improve the stats then consider moving them off to a different ad group so they don’t affect your other keywords.

Final Words
If you do these three things, you’ll be off to a great start. Of course there are numerous other optimizations you can do to continue driving down the cost of running ads on Google. If you haven’t already, take a look at one of my older posts entitled 5 Easy Ways to Optimize PPC Campaigns.

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