How to Keep Ad Costs Down… Way Down

Most people know the main way to lock down ad spend… set your maximum daily spend at 1/30th of what you want to spend per month.

But in my experience, that often backfires. What you want is quality traffic, and you get it by eliminating the big leaks in Google AdWords’s ship.

It’s like any ship. You have to expect that leaks are inherent in the system and maintain vigilance to keep your money from leaking out.

The first leak to plug is the Display Network. You probably glossed over it in the initial campaign setup and didn’t really pay much attention to it. But it’s a huge waste of your money. The people who will see your ad aren’t directly searching on Google. You’ve seen those annoying Made-for-Adsense websites that are full of ads and scraped content from other sites. Google has been doing better at keeping those sites out of its index, but many are still around.

On the other hand, if you are trying to get the word out about your product or service and don’t mind if your ad is shown on various websites, Google does give you the option to search by keyword for the best match of subject matter. “The Display Network includes a collection of websites that have partnered with Google (display partners), YouTube, and specific Google properties that display AdWords ads. You can opt in to the Google Display Network to show text, image, video, and rich media ads. These ads can be targeted automatically based on themes in your keyword list, manually (matching specific placements you select), based on specific audiences you want to reach, or specific topics you want to target.”

But either way, you need to uncheck the box that says Display Network. (If you want to opt in to it, set up a separate campaign.)

What about The Search Network?

“The Search Network includes Google and other search sites. Ads can appear beside or above search results for keywords that you choose.”

It’s not a huge waste of money, but if trimming costs to the bare minimum is important, uncheck The Search Network as well. That way you’ll have ads showing on Google only, and you won’t miss much traffic at all.

Another way to get more bang for your ad’s buck is to continually improve your landing pages. Never, ever use an existing page on your site. By having a dedicated landing page that can be constantly tweaked, you have a shot at raising the quality score for your best keywords. That’s right, Google actually charges you less when it perceives the quality of your landing page is high. You’ll need to use your very best search-engine optimization (SEO) skills to optimize your landing pages if you want high quality scores, or you can outsource this to yours truly, PPCsmith.com.

This cost-cutting idea is risky, but if you are seriously on top of your keyword phrases, you can bid only on exact-match. Broad-match is a definite money-waster, as Google will take liberties with showing your ad and not always match it with the appropriate search query. Phrase-match gives you a bit more control, but you have to monitor your analytics to see what the entire search phrase was. If you sell silk sheets but only in red and white, then bidding on “silk sheets” as a phrase-match means Google will display your ad when the query is “black silk sheets.” If you didn’t designate “black” as a negative-match, that is.

Once you place the word “black” in your negative keywords, voila! It will keep your ad from showing for “black silk sheets” or “silk black sheets” or “silk sheets black” or any other query containing the word “black.” And it will save you from paying for clicks from traffic that have no chance of buying your product or service!

Another way to waste money is by displaying ads that don’t get clicked much. Google penalizes your low CTR by charging you more. So unless you care only about branding, avoid bidding on broad-match, and checking your analytics on a regular basis to uncover more words to designate as negative-match.

Last but not least, use your server’s own logs to verify Google’s click tally. Sure, Google says it has state-of-the-art click-fraud detection software, but should you leave the wolf in charge of guarding the henhouse? Everyone who owns a website needs to be able to check their own server logs.

If there is a discrepancy between how many click visits you received and how many Google charged you for, it’s a sure bet your Google Analytic stats will favor Google. So if your web host isn’t retaining logs for your website, email them to start today. There are lots of free programs for analyzing raw server logs, and if you’d like, you can outsource the analysis to your friendly PPC consultant, PPCsmith.com!