5 Tips to Lower Your Google Adwords Costs

Many small businesses are increasingly turning to the internet to market and sell their products and services. One route many have taken is pay per click advertising, and in particular Google Adwords.

If you use Adwords as one of your internet marketing tools you may already have found it to be increasingly expensive. In fact, if your Adwords account is not managed regularly you will find it to be the most expensive marketing tool you use.
To avoid you losing your shirt with Adwords here are 5 tips you can implement today to reduce your costs, and improve the volume and quality of the clicks your ads receive.

Tip #1 – Quality Score

Perhaps the most important thing you can do to get your costs under control, and lower the cost of your clicks, is to improve your quality score.

A quality score is a score that Google gives to each of thekeywords in an adgroup. The higher the quality score the more Google rewards you with lower click costs and higher ad positioning. The quality score alone can help you to compete in very competitive markets where the click costs are very high and end up paying far less than your competition for higher placed ads.

What affects the Google quality score are the following factors:

1. Relevance of the ad content to the ad landing page

2. Quality of the landing page

3. Performance of the ad

4. The length of time people stay on your landing page after clicking on your ad.

In my experience the most common cause of poor quality scores is the quality of the landing page a visitor arrives at after clicking on an ad.

To find your quality score for a particular keyword click in an adgroup, click on the keywords tab and the quality score column should be listed. If you cannot see it you can click on “Filter and views”, then “Customize columns” and select “Qual.Score”:

I have highlighted the quality score column in the image below:

You should be aiming for a perfect 10 quality, or as close to it as possible.

To improve your quality score make sure your landing page is relevant to the ad, focuses on the same keyword as your adgroup,and provides real content to your visitor. Pages that only collect email addresses, or try to sell multiple affiliate products typically do not get high quality scores.

Tip #2 – single keyword per adgroup

Another mistake I see being made all the time is placing tens if not hundreds of keywords into a single adgroup. At one time this was a good thing to do in Adwords, now it affects your quality score because you cannnot possibly optimise a single landing page for every keyword listed in an adgroup.

The best practice is to now include only one keyword in an adgroup and only one keyword type; broad, phrase or exact match.
Here is a poor example of an adgroup that focuses on digital cameras:

Adgroup Name: digital cameras
Keywords: digital camera  digital cameras  cameras digital  ”digital camera”  ”digital cameras”  ”cameras digital”  [digital camera]  [digital cameras]  [cameras digital]  nikon digital camera  [canon digital camera]  [pentax digital camera]  ”canon digital camera”  ”coolpix camera”  ”nikon digital camera”  [nikon digital camera]

Here is the recommended solution:

Adgroup Name: digital camera
Keywords: [digital camera]

Adgroup Name: digital cameras
Keywords: [digital cameras]

Adgroup Name: Nikon digital camera
Keywords: nikon digital camera

and so on…

Tip #3 – separate campaign for content network

For each Adwords campaign you can define where you want your ads to appear

Don’t select both the Google Search and Search partners option together with the Content Network option for the same campaign. Have two separate campaigns, one configured to display ads on Google Search and Search Partners, the other campaign to display ads only on the Content Network

The purpose of doing this is so that you can avoid your content network click prices and ad performance being affected by the search network click performance and vice-versa. Your quality scores can also be improved this way.

Tip #4 – split test ads

For every adgroup run two ads and check their performance once a week. The best performing ad ie. the one with the lower cost per conversion, not the best clickthrough rate, should be kept and the worst performing one replaced with another ad. If you are not tracking conversions in Adwords (if not, why not?) replace the ad with the lowest clickthrough rate.

To correctly split-test your ads you need to select the “Rotate;show ads more evenly” option in the campaign settings

Tip #5 – Structure your ads correctly

Finally structure and word your ads in such a way as to encourage clicks. The more clicks your ad attracts the more Google will reduce your per click cost and increase your ad position.

Here is a simple rule of thumb to bear in mind when writing your ads:

1. Headline: only include your keyword nothing else!

2. Ad Line 1: describe a benefit of your product or service

3. Ad line 2: describe a feature of your product or service

4. Display URL: capitalise the first letter of every word eg: MyProductIsGreat.co.uk

5. Try to use numbers and/or facts in your ad eg: decreases costs by 20%, only £14.99 etc.

6. Avoid using the word free if you are advertising a product, unless the product is free of course!

By following these 5 simple tips your click costs will come down and your ads will perform better due to the improved quality score and relevance of your landing page. Don’t expect the costs to come down within a few days it usually takes at least one or two weeks.