by Robert Clough

Are you overpaying for your online advertising? 

If your average cost per click is high, there are ways to minimize your Google advertising cost.

If you don’t work on optimizing your cost per click (CPC) on Google, you could waste thousands of dollars you could have used to invest elsewhere or gain more exposure.

Stick with us, we’re about to show you how to pay as little as possible for your ads on Google.

Minimizing Google Advertising Cost

Cost per click can vary greatly depending on the ad, your campaign, and more. Who you are bidding against is a major part of how much you’ll spend. 

You can find out more about SEO, PPC and other marketing strategies to get a better understanding before you start bidding.

1. Focus on More Than Your Main Keyword

If you only focus on a main keyword, your CPC is going to be pretty high.

Focusing on a keyword with only one or two words puts you up against the most competitors. When you add what are called long tail keywords, you’re going to pay less to get in front of the right people.

Another bonus for long tail keywords is that you can see exactly what the user intent is when they’re searching. Do they want to buy or are they just looking for more information?

When you know what the user intent is for a search term, you’ll be able to create a more relevant page that will better serve visitors to your website.

2. Bid on Low-Competition Keywords

This tip flows nicely from tip number one.

You don’t have to bid on any high-competition keywords to win with your ad strategy. Instead, focus on bidding on a lot of low-competition keywords.

Low-competition keywords will allow you to stay within your budget but still get the attention your business needs.

3. Use Geo-Targeting

Geo-targeting is when you focus on a specific area when setting up your campaign. If you are a local business, it makes sense that you would target your city and surrounding cities.

Even national companies can target various geographical areas where people are more likely to buy your product or services.  

While geo-targeting might not get instant results that bring down your CPC, it will help in the long run as your click-through rate (CTR) goes up. The higher your CTR is, the better your quality score will be. This ultimately leads to a lower CPC.

4. High Quality Score

Google rewards companies that offer a good experience for their customers. The way they figure out who gets the rewards is by giving elements of your campaign quality scores.

The better your quality score is, the better your CPC is going to be. It also determines where your ads will be positioned.

To get a higher quality score, you need to make sure your page, your ad, and your keywords are all highly relevant. If any of these things are out of line, you’re not going to have the highest quality score possible.

5. Theme Your Ad Groups

While theming your ad groups can take a lot of time, it is going to make a big impact on your wallet.

Creating ad groups that are very relevant is going to help you get the high quality score we were talking about above.

You might create a theme for each specific product you sell. You may also create ad groups for specific topics that your blog covers if you want to increase traffic to your website.

If you see one group that is doing better than the others you may choose to stop running the low performing group.

6. Schedule Your Ads

Do you run your ads 24/7? If your ads are running when your ideal audience is sleeping, you could be losing out on serious money.

Think of running ads 24/7 as leaving the water faucet on when you’re not using it.

Look at your analytics and see when you get the best response to your ads. You might be surprised with what you find. Don’t assume that you know when you would get the best response.

Make sure you base your ad scheduling on actual data instead of guesswork.

Scheduling your ads when you’re likely to get a response will not only cut down on ad spend, it will also allow you to know when to expect leads to contact you.

7. Negative Keywords Are Your Friend

Don’t overlook the negative keyword section. This section allows you to keep your ads from being triggered by irrelevant queries.

If your ads are showing when people aren’t even searching for what you’re offering, your CTR is going to show up lower than it really is.

You want to make your negative keyword list as big as you can to keep out as many irrelevant search queries as possible.

The higher CTR helps with the all-important quality score. Setting up your campaigns correctly will help get more of the right people to click and also stop your ads from showing to the wrong audience.

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