7 Budget Saving Tips for your PPC Campaign

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July 28th, 2008 by Geoff

You can't always afford all the keywords you want in your Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaign. Or maybe you want to reduce your PPC spend, as you tighten your belt during these tough economic conditions. Whatever the reason, it is not uncommon to for a 'Campaign Budget Alert' to pop up in your Google account. If your recommended daily budget is more than you can afford and your ads are not appearing consistently throughout the day, below is 7 budget saving tips that may help:
1. Opt out of Google's content network and Google's search network (i.e. Google's “Search Partners” like Ask and Lycos). In the Networks section of your campaign settings, check only the Google Search box. This means that your PPC ads will only appear on Google.co.uk or Google.com search results, which is your bread and butter.
2. Check your Target Audience in your campaign settings. If most of your customers are based in England, maybe you should target England and not the whole of the UK. This means you won’t be paying for clicks from places where you get little custom from. For example, you may get little-to-no business from Northern Ireland because your company only offers free shipping to mainland UK, so therefore your PPC campaign should target England, Wales and Scotland – and not Northern Ireland.
3. Ad scheduling. Instead of showing your ads 24/7, choose select times to run your campaign. It goes without saying that it is cheaper to run your campaign from 7 am to 11 pm than from 12am to 12pm. Check Analytics to see what time most of your conversions come through and then schedule your campaign accordingly.
4. Review your keywords one by one. Bid on your core, business critical keywords only. Cull any high spending keywords that don’t convert.
5. Lower the CPC (Cost Per Click) bids of keywords in high positions, particularly if they are not converting or converting too expensively. As long as your ads don’t drop below position 11, you will remain on the first page of the search results. By moving your ads to position 6 or 7, you can save a lot of money and still keep reasonable visibility on the first page.
6. Switch budget burning keywords from broad match to exact match. If you have done your keyword research properly and you have covered every possible variation of a search term (including plurals and misspellings) then this won’t be a problem. You may want to cancel Automatic Matching as well.
7. Check your negative keywords. Have you got every negative keyword you and Google’s keyword tool can think of? Make 100% sure that you are not wasting clicks/money on a keyword that relates to a product and service you don’t offer!

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