The Clickable Search Engine Marketing Blog

When the economy is down, effective marketing becomes even more important to your bottom line.  For online advertisers, there are many ways you can adapt search advetising to save money and lower your cost-per-acquisition.   The key is to avoid running your campaigns on auto-pilot. Instead, you should actively apply proven best practices to improve your return on ad spend, especially now. 

Don’t Overbid On Keywords

With shrinking marketing budgets and many businesses closing their doors, some keywords have less competition.  Therefore, it is wise to analyze keyword positioning and cost-per-click (CPC).  If you are using Clickable, simply click on the Act tab and review the recommendations.  Clickable’s ActEngine automatically analyzes keyword position, cost-per-click and recommends the optimal bid to keep positioning and conversions up.  You can also perform some analysis in the "Keyword Filter and Bulk Edit" tool. Start by sorting your keywords by average position from highest to lowest.  If you have keywords that are averaging first or second position, consider lowering your bid.  The competition and CPC levels have probably come down for this keyword, and you can apply budget to important terms that don’t rank as high. (For instructions on how to reduce bids in bulk, check out Vernon's tool tip on the Bulk Edit tool.)
 
Adjust High-Conversion Keywords With Care

Lower your CPC with caution on terms that have high conversion rates.  Lower your bids on high converting keywords in smaller increments (5%-10%) and monitor positioning and conversion rates closely over a couple of weeks.  Clickable’s ActEngine recommendations automatically adjust, allocating more of your marketing budget to high converting keywords, without overpaying for clicks.

Optimize Your Campaigns By Day And Time

If your business is not open 24/7, it might make sense to optimize your bids by day and time. In AdWords, this feature is called Ad Scheduling. For Microsoft adCenter, it is part of the ad network’s incremental bidding.

Conversion rates are the best way to determine if optimizing by day and time are a good idea. Begin by reviewing your conversion rates by hour, and by day.  If there is a dramatic decrease in conversions over the weekend, you might try scheduling your ads to run Monday through Friday.  Or perhaps you run a service company and are only open from 9-5.  Then you might run your ads from 8:30-5:30 every day.  Stop spending money on days and times that don’t produce returns.  Tony gave some great tips on Ad Scheduling last year, and Search Engine Land has a great Blog post about Ad Scheduling here. 

Improve Your Quality Score

Lastly, try improving your Google Quality Score to lower your CPC.  Many advertisers don’t realize Google charges less for relevant advertising.  If you have a low quality score you might be paying 2-3 times as much for first place positioning.  Hanny wrote a great blog post about best practices to optimize landing pages, one of the key influences of Quality Score.

Running a campaign on autopilot can cost you in the long run.  Save money and improve the performance of your campaigns by actively applying best practices: lower your CPC; schedule your advertising; and optimize your landing pages.  If you are looking for more great search marketing tips and advice check out Clickable University’s Best Practices.

Trace, Clickable SEM Guru

Note: Clickable employees volunteer several hours a week to helping other search marketers succeed. "Clickable Gurus" participate in numerous online search communities to provide straightforward answers to numerous questions, and, each week, one of the gurus posts a search marketing tip to the Clickable Blog.

There are many ways to increase your Google Page Rank and Quality Score . Doing so helps lower your costs