Are you worried about getting decreasing returns on your Paid Google PPC campaigns?

5 methods to improve the efficiency of PPC campaigns

  1. restrict the PPC (Pay Per Click) ads to times of the day when customers are likely to be looking
  2. make sure the ad text relfects the offer so that people know why they are clicking on the PPC ad
  3. try sending them to a specific page of the site, so make an ad for aframes, rather than sending them to the homepage of the site them straight to the aframes page
  4. try turning off the google content network and sticking with google search placement
  5. if you can make a separate PPC ad for each major product or keyword set then you will get a lower cost per click. so for example if you were advertising on the keywords “lightbox signs” but then you didn’t include those keywords in your ad text then you will pay a higher cost per click than someone that does include them in their ad text.

There are quite a few ways you can approach the improvement of your PPC campaigns, just try a few ideas at a time, don’t try to do everything at once.

  1. Break your campaign in groups of 10-20 highly related keywords.
  2. Use exact matching or phrase matching (ie put your keywords pairs and triplets in quotes)
  3. Avoid broad matching of generic keywords, try to pick keywords that are decision points
  4. Use negative keywords (e.g., -free) to improve CTR & lower cost.
  5. Put keywords in the headline and repeat them in the body of the PPC ad.
  6. Ad text of the body: 1st line = descriptive benefit and 2nd line = a feature, offer, or call to action.
  7. Create separate landing pages for each target keyword group and make content relevant to keywords, putting the landing pages in sub-directories named after target keywords and making sure the sub-directory is included in display URL: www.something.com/keyword.
  8. Find tangential keywords, by that i mean, think about what else your potential clients would be doing or thinking about prior to seeking out your service. So if you are doing vehicle sign wraps you might want to pick some keywords to experiment with that are related to vehicle magnetic signs, or car detailing. you need to be careful with this though so that you don’t waste money.

You can split your ads into separate ad groups or even separate campaigns depending on the size and scope of your target market and PPC

  1. Run 2 PPC ads side-by-side. Shuffle the word order, capitalization, try synonyms, price vs no price, etc. Run a week at a time and always replace the poor performer with a tweaked version of the good performer.
  2. Run different campaigns for different geographical regions if you are covering areas outside the local area
  3. Try targeting a limited geographic area and then pick a similar small geographical area in another state or region and see if the results vary much to figure out if buyers are motivated by the location of your business to buy.
  4. Search Search Network and Content network ads in separate campaigns and if you are going to do them both then set the content network with lower CPC and daily budgets.
I hope that that has given you a few ideas that you can try to reduce the cost of your PPC marketing campaigns with Google.