Cutting Costs on a $30K per month AdWords Budget
For those companies who are fortunate enough to have large Pay-Per-Click (PPC) budgets, effective use of every penny is extremely important. For this reason, there are a number of ways to go about making sure you receive the maximum return on Ad Spend. Here is a quick list of bullets to check off in optimizing and cutting costs:
AD’s: Does each and every adgroup have at least 3 ad creatives running at once? If the adgroup has not had more than one or two ever, getting up to three or four would be a good idea. If so, checking on the past performance of the ads is a must. Look back for the past 90 days to see the click-through-ratio (CTR) performance on average. Also compare this to the past 30 days performance. Cut the lowest performing one or two. Again do not delete it, just pause it. And create another.- Relevant Landing Pages: For companies this size multiple locations nation wide or world wide will most likely be hot spots. Finding those geographic hot spots and creating landing pages for those cities, states, etc. will dramatically increase conversions in most cases. People looking for services, products or information will greatly appreciate seeing their local area acknowledged on your site.
- Time Targeting: Effective time targeting for big budgets is Awesome. Most of us have heard of the 80/20 rule in business. For PPC, start off with 80/20 or try90/10. By checking your conversions each hour, you can take the lowest performing 10-20% of the day and bid down during that time frame (this way you can conserve your budget and reallocate during peak performing times). This will help you place higher and/or get more conversions during the peak hours where competition can be tough! You can find the conversions for per-hour breakdown in Google Analytics on the left hand navigation bar by clicking on Goals, then Total Conversions then Graph By Hour.
These are three top tips on cutting costs for large PPC budgets right off the bat. As always, make sure that this applies to your campaigns and then Test, Test, Test and Analyze, Analyze, Analyze. I would also suggest making small changes at a time and then comparing it with month-over-month data. Be careful when making big changes to big PPC budgets. You should err on the side of caution, opting for slow improvements versus throwing a wrench into your currently effective marketing.
For more Help in Optimizing your Large PPC budget: Look To The Right Internet Marketing
I completely agree with your testing sentiment, especially since Google is getting expensive. New report today from Covario showed Google has 85% of PPC spend in North America. Since they have 71% share of eyeballs, they have a disproportionately high ratio of PPC dollars. Everyone is running scared in this down economy, and marketers are going with the “safe bet†- Google PPC. But, if everyone does that, clicks are going to get more and more expensive, and results are going to fall for all advertisers - except for the smart ones that do rigorous ad copy and landing page testing.