Pay Per Click (PPC) marketing, Ie Adwords, Bing, Display, is costly and people with little experience can diminish their marketing budgets and have only a few sales to show for it. To get the best return on investment (ROI), businesses need to attract high quality traffic to their landing page and not overspend on cost-per-click (CPC).
Because Google manages 67.78% of the search engine market, it might seem natural for a PPC marketer to use their platform. However, Google is highly competitive and saturated, and this can raise your CPC. The category of insurance has a top CPC of $54.91, and it has the highest percentage (24%) of the most expensive 10,000 keywords. The categories of loans and mortgages follow.
Lowering maximum bids will help lower your CPC; however, lowering them too far, will cause the positioning of your website to suffer. To improve your click-through rate (CTR) lower the bid on your top performing keywords. Keep a close eye on the new CTR. If the keywords continue to do well, keep lowering your bids.
Algorithms may not have your ROI in mind when making automatic decisions. Manual bidding can also be used to gain more control of your CPC. At first, this is overwhelming, so do it one campaign at a time. Long tail keywords can also lower CPC, and they account for 70% of search traffic. Changing a search term from “running shoes” (priced at $2.66 per click) to “best running shoes for men” (priced at $0.61 per click) can save a company $2 per click. The amount of traffic will be less, but its quality will improve, and it will save you money.
Adding negative keywords will minimize the chances that someone who is looking for something else (like women running shoes, instead of men running shoes) will click on your website. In this way it ensures that you get traffic that is relevant to your business’s offering. Tools such as Wordstream offer a free negative keyword tool that is simple to use. You input a term in its browser, and it shows you all the possible negative words for that term in a list. You can mark them as relevant or irrelevant.
Sticky manages over $2 million in Australian PPC marketing. If you want to learn more about lowering getting better results from your Pay Per Click Marketing contact us.