One of the most important numbers to keep track of with your PPC campaigns is your cost per click. The cost per click is how much you’re paying a search engine to show your ad in its specific place. Just like most things in life, ideally you would pay the least amount of money for the best result. There are multiple theories regarding strategies to get the best paid position on a search engine, but there are even more things you can do on your end to reduce the amount you’re paying for each click.
Boost Your Quality Score
The quality score associated with your PPC campaign effects how much you pay for a click. If your quality score is low, you will be required to pay more in order to get a higher spot in the paid search results. Search engines want to give their users the best match for their query. So if you have low quality, they would rather give the result to someone with higher quality.
However, you can boost your quality score in a few simple ways. Sarah Stemen, contributor to PPC Hero, states that improving your landing pages by writing better copy, having optimized heading tags, providing alt text for images, and having a fast load speed for you page can all help to improve your quality score. Once your quality has risen, you won’t be paying so much for a top spot in the search results pages.
Pump Up Your Click Through Rate
Your click through rate is how often someone clicks on your ad once they have been exposed to it. If your click through rate is low, the search engine takes that to mean that the result you are showing up for doesn’t match what the searcher is looking for, requiring you to pay a higher cost per click to continue to show up there.
Search Engine Land’s contributor Brad Geddes recommends a few simple tricks for increasing your click through rate. Some of these tricks include using longer headlines for your ads, using a display URL as opposed to your actual URL, and removing prices from your ads. The point of all these tactics is to get more people to click on your ad. If you see something that doesn’t seem appealing to potential customers, remove it.
Nix Negative Keywords
Negative keywords can help you to not show up for results that you don’t want to have your ad associated with. This could include keywords that aren’t related or take your keywords in a direction you don’t want. By providing your campaign with a good negative keywords list, Neil Eneix, contributor to Social Media Today, says that your campaign will stop spending unnecessarily, protect your brand, and improve the engagement and success of your ads.
The bottom line of every business comes down to money. You want to find marketing avenues that will help you bring in more money without costing too much. And by lowering your cost per click for your PPC accounts, you’ll be honing in on an avenue that can do just that.
