How to Decrease and Manage Your PPC Costs

Decreasing and controlling your AdWords PPC, or pay per click, campaign costs is important in order to ensure you adhere to your conversion goals. Within your campaign, there are several levels of cost control. Campaign costs can be trimmed through a few adjustments you can make manually. Additionally, keyword costs can also be managed automatically through bid management software tools.

The first expenses you should examine are the campaign costs. You should have separate campaigns targeting your Google search ads and your content network ads. If you have this, you will be able to manage budgeting and adjust ad and keyword bids for each of your networks separately. In addition, for your content campaigns, using category and site exclusions to preserve your click dollars is highly recommended. This will prevent your ads from showing up on unrelated websites.

The next thing to do is to determine your most successful keywords and then redo bids if necessary. Additionally, for your existing keywords you can also add distinctive query match types, particularly for keywords that are expensive or have high CPAs (costs per action). This will let you set individual bids for each different match type.

You should also look at your keywords’ Quality Scores. Any keywords you find with four or less for the Quality Scores and have zero conversions should be put on hold. The Quality Score will affect the keyword’s CPC (cost per click) and bid estimate for the first page. It will also have an effect on the ranking of your ad and whether or not the keyword is eligible for entrance into the ad auction.

However, you may find that you’re working with thousands of keywords. This could even be hundreds of thousands of different terms. In this case, you will require at least partial automation to assist you in managing and controlling the expenses of the many long-tail keywords you may have. Below are numerous bid management tools to help you succeed in doing this.

Acquisio Search

The Acquisio SEARCH platform includes a effective campaign and bid control module based on rules. Among many other functions, the tool reveals to you which keywords will need to be paused. It also sends you an email when your keyword terms have insufficient Quality Scores. In addition, it lets you determine the best CPCs.

Clickable

Clickable ActEngine examines your PPC campaign and will automatically come up with recommendations for the best performance, specifically, it will propose raising your bids on the most successful keyword terms, and decreasing bids of your worst performing keywords. It can also alert you of keywords that gone below the original first page estimations.

Podium adCore

This is an algorithm for bid management that can alter bids at both the ad groud and keyword levels. It can also assist in testing various ad creatives. It also has a keyword cleanup option for eliminating poor keywords.

DoubleClick DART Search

This automated tool for bid management, which is part of DART Search, is able to bid on the keywords you want as many as 12 times daily. This lets you come up with a strategy for bidding by picking two rules you would like to apply in a specific order. The bid rules for this includes ROI and those based on position.

Omniture SearchCenter

The Search Center is a portion of the Online Omniture Marketing Suite for applications. This bid engine is automated and the presents different tactics for bid management. This includes both portfolio and rules-based tactics.

Even if you are using automated tools, you should still practice regularly scheduled manual management of your campaign expenses. The above described methods should assist you in keeping all your PPC costs in line.

About the author:
Michael Ramirez is a freelance web consultant living in Montreal. He can be reached at mikejoeramirez@gmail.com

Tags: AdWords, PPC

This entry was first published on Thursday, October 29th, 2009 at 7:02 am and is filed under Search Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.