How to Cut Your Pay Per Click Costs

We spoke earlier about the tendency of people to cast their keywords net too far and wide, and to end up costing themselves a lot more money than is necessary because of this.

One of the common forms of this is to pay for phrases and keywords that are not exactly linked to your product or service, and also to pay for terms that will not be used by people looking to buy.

As an example of this I’d like to give a real life case of one of our clients who ran a scrap gold dealers.

When we first looked at this customers keywords list he had a total of 83 live keywords/phrases, which is hardly excessive by some standards.

Upon examining this keywords list we found no less than 28 of these phrases (so roughly one third) were related to current gold and other precious metal and gold coin prices and values.

E.g. “today’s gold price” or “live gold price” or “coin values”

Now this at first might seem like a reasonable list of keywords to use, after all people who invest in gold and silver or other precious metals will be interested to know the current price, and it would be a great way to get people already buying or selling gold onto their website?

Well actually, no, it is not an effective list of keywords at all!

First of all the people who are likely to be looking at the price of gold are almost certainly going to be the people who have invested in gold already and want to check how their investment is doing.

If you think about it anyone who is looking to buy will be interested in finding a dealer they can trust and who they can get a fair price from, but with gold there is no room for price differences between genuine dealers.

Gold has a price set by the market, and all Krugerrands for example contain the same amount of gold – so they will be the same price wherever you buy from.

So buyers are likely to compare dealers against each other to make sure they’re not paying too much, but checking today’s price of an ounce or gram of gold really tells them nothing.

Secondly, and probably more importantly, this dealer was predominantly buying scrap gold and people who have a few broken pieces of jewellery to sell are not going to be remotely interested in what today’s gold price is.

They are almost certainly not going to watch the market to try and find the right time to sell, they will decide that they are going to sell and then do it.

Consequently you can see that virtually every click that this client paid for when someone searched for the current gold price cost him money for no return, since they will almost exclusively have been people checking how their own investments were doing.

Also important to consider is that these keywords did not reflect his core business.

This clients core business was for him to buy other peoples scrap gold, and occasionally to sell some of the gold coins that he had acquired to investors – but 95% of his business was buying scrap gold.

For this client then the core phrases that he needed to concentrate on were for example:

“Scrap Gold”

“Sell gold jewellery” (and the American spelling “sell gold jewelry”)

“Sell gold coins”

“Sell gold bars”

Etc.

Since he also sold some coins available on occasion he might also have included keywords when he had gold coins available to reach potential customers who were looking to buy, e.g.:

“Buy gold sovereigns”

“Buy gold coins”

“Invest in gold coins”

“Buy gold Bullion”

Etc.

You can see however that the core keywords are now completely aligned with his business, AND they also contain an action word, something that all visitors have to do if they are to become customers – i.e. buy or sell!

Consequently what we did was to pause every keyword in his campaign that wasn’t directly aligned to his business, and refine those that were (more on this in part 2), and the results were remarkable.

We took him from 83 keywords to 21, reduced his PPC spend by over 90%, and his turnover hardly moved at all. Most of his advertising spend was money going up in smoke.

Now, this is one particular example, and of course since every industry or sector is different there may be other keywords that would be good action words that you could use.

If you are selling in a market where price competitiveness is expected from your customers then perhaps “cheap,” “cheapest,” “best value” etc may be good action words for you to use.

This only holds true of course if you really do have cheap/the cheapest/the best value product – otherwise anyone who clicks your ad will not find what they want and will leave without buying, costing you money!

Another common search performed by people is when they have decided on the make of product that they want and they search prior to buying.

Sometimes these people are looking for reviews of the product prior to buying, sometimes for the best price, and sometimes just for a place that sells what they want, and so incorporating brand names into your keywords can work very well, you could have:

“brand x”

“brand x shoes”

“cheap brand x shoes”

“brand x reviews”

“brand x dealers”

Etc.

Mostly the choice of keywords that you use will be determined by the volume of searches that people make each month, it is not practical to create a list of keywords and phrases that nobody uses – we’ll cover how to find some killer keywords in part 4.

The key message here is to sit down and think clearly and carefully about what your core business is, think about what your customers and potential customers are looking for, and how they would search for this on the internet.

Then go through your existing keywords list and be brutal!

Pause EVERY keyword and phrase that does not EXACTLY match what your customer is looking for and what your business does and then watch as your PPC costs fall through the floor without killing your turnover.

This is something that you can implement right now and start saving money today.

Do this first and see the difference so that you can measure where you were and where you are after making the changes. Then you can look at adding new phrases that contain action words important in your industry and measure the difference again (e.g. PPC costs against PPC sales).

You can do this right now with your keywords list and see money saving results today. Remember to be brutal with your trimming, and also remember to read the tips section at the end – there are some more very important topics in there that you need to add into your PPC Campaign.