google adwords: 9 ways to optimize your marketing cost in google adwords
Google Adwords is one of the most popular online marketing services available. There are several different reasons as to why you should use Adwords for your online marketing. One of the benefits is the ability to control your overall budget. You can reduce or optimize the cost in Google Adwords using several different techniques.
Unfortunately, online marketing can also get quite expensive. If you do not keep a good lid on it, you could see your cost increase over time, with out the expected returns or revenue. There are several different strategies or techniques you can adopt to lower your overall Adwords budget.
The below techniques make the assumption that you are already generating enough and more clicks that is causing your budget to run over. So, the primary reason you would want to follow the techniques below is to reduce the over all budget or cost of your Adwords campaigns.
1. Avoid Popular Keywords and Bidding Wars
Popular Keywords are the ones that generate a lot of impressions so it is very tempting to go after them. Unfortunately, these also can trigger bidding wars and you could end up paying more overall. If you cannot bring the CPC of a keyword down, then it might be better off avoiding the popular keyword altogether.
2. Remove or Avoid Low Converting Keywords
Some keywords in your campaign perform better than others. You want to avoid the keywords that not converting very well, and put those resources towards the keywords that are performing better. You should identify the low converting keywords first, and then decide whether you want to avoid them completely or under-bid them depending on the keyword stats.
3. Use only Exact and Phrase Matches for Keywords
There are mainly three different keyword match types you can use: Broad, Phrase and Exact. Using the broad match will get you more impressions and clicks, but they also tend to be clicks that convert at a much lower rate. You should avoid using broad matches and use exact matches to improve on your return on investment.
4. Remove Brand Keywords
You should not spend money on advertising for your own brand name, if you want to reduce the cost. This is especially true, if you rank high enough on the search result page for searches that use your brand name.
5. Pick a Monthly or Daily Budget
Try not to keep your daily as well as monthly budget open-ended. As it is virtually impossible to monitor your campaign round the clock, you could end up spending more than you intended. Pick an overall budget that you can afford, and then stick with it. You can increase or decrease your budget over time, depending on the performance of the campaign.
6. Optimize Keywords with Low Quality Score
One of the major factor that affects the CPC is the quality score of the keywords. If your keywords happen to have a low quality score, then you tend to pay more for the same number of clicks at the same ad position compared to your competitors. Optimize the ads and landing page to improve on your quality score.
7. Avoid the Display Network
You can avoid the display network altogether and concentrate solely on the search network for your campaign. Usually, the search network returns a better return on investment and tend to perform better than the traffic from search network.
8. Target Long-Tailed Keywords
Long tailed keywords bring less traffic but it is usually a more targeted audience that convert better. This means if you use only long-tailed keywords in your campaign, it will tend to convert better overall. You do have to make sure that you don't overdo it as that can cause the traffic to drop and you may only get very few clicks.
9. Target Specific Ad Positions
You can identify certain ad positions that have the perfect combination of cost and conversion. Always trying to get the top position on the page may not be the best strategy. Bid less than the recommended amount and try to land somewhere other than the top three positions. This will reduce the number of clicks you get, but it should reduce the overall CPC and cost for your keyword. This is a good strategy for keyword that are important to the campaign and are also very popular and costly.
It is a combination of all the above techniques that will allow you to market effectively while keeping the overall cost under control. Some techniques will work better for you than others, but it is important that you monitor or analyse your campaigns on a regular basis and optimize them according its performance.