Reduce Adwords Spend With These 4 Powerful Tactics

Every business owner is looking for ways to make their budget stretch further.

If you’re using, or thinking of using, Google Adwords to market your business, then you’ll want to implement these 4 tactics to reduce Adwords spend straight away.

Less spend equals more money for clicks – and more customers through the door!

1. Analyse Your Cost Per Revenue

Because Adwords is effectively one large auction house and the demand for clicks on Google rises continuously, your campaign spend will keep going up.

There are ways to reduce Adwords spend and at the same time maintain campaign performance – we’ll look at cost per click (CPC) and two options to reduce costs.

For example, a CPC of £1 with a conversion rate of 2% and a value of £250 will result in a cost per revenue (CPR) of 20%. This means that for every pound spent on Adwords leads you see a five pound return.

You could reduce Adwords spend with a CPC decrease. When improvements to the CPC campaign causes a drop to £0.90 this will result in a CPR of 18%. This creates the possibility of reducing the budget by 10% without affecting return.

Tip: Choose long tail keywords. They’re often inexpensive and highly targeted.

Alternatively, increase the Conversion Ratio and value. When the CPC remains at £1, because you’ve made considerable improvements to your website, the conversion ration increases to 2.2% meaning the conversion value rises to £275. The CPR also decreases to 18%. Again, this creates the option to reduce the budget by 10% without affecting return.

Tip: Improve your Quality Score by re-working your ads and paying extra attention to your landing pages.

2. Lower Your Cost Per Click (CPC) To Decrease Your Spend

Following on from step 1, when the Quality Score has gone up, you can safely lower CPCs without risking a decrease in traffic. However, if your Quality Score isn’t perfected, there are still possibilities for lowering your cost per click. Try:

• Lower the CPC of expensive keywords
• Pause expensive keywords or reduce the budget and use the reduction on less expensive keywords
• Use Exact Phrasing or Phrase Matching for expensive keywords and avoid Broad Matching – the former tend to be less expensive
• Avoid bidding on expensive keywords: often you will find that with a little research, a different keyword with equal or slightly lower traffic costs less, but yield the same or better results

3. Reduce Adwords Spend By Avoiding Expensive And Irrelevant Actions

If your campaigns run 24/7, you’re likely spending more than you need. Research when your target audience uses Google – weekdays, weekends, day time, evenings – and schedule your campaigns accordingly. This will reduce Adwords spend as clicks won’t occur at times when your target audience is online, searching for your solutions.

This is especially relevant for campaigns with larger budgets and higher spends per ad group. Campaigns to improve your brand awareness can be run at times outside of the core activity time frame of your audience – as long as you keep the overall budget relatively small and the average spend down.

4. Exclude Visitors And Devices To Reduce Adwords Spend

Utilise negative keywords to prevent your ads being shown on search query results which have little or no direct value to your business. This will not only reduce Adwords spend, but also increase your click through rate.

You may also want to exclude visitors from irrelevant locations with geo-targeting. If your business operates exclusively in London, it makes sense to show your ads only in search query results from London.

If your web-infrastructure isn’t optimised for mobile devices and similar, exclude those devices. However, if your website isn’t mobile-friendly, you should seriously consider getting it fixed as more and more customers are using smart phones and tablets to access the internet. You wouldn’t want to lose out on those opportunities.

Excluding visitors and scheduling your campaigns has an immediate effect but, unsurprisingly, if you’re looking to reduce Adwords spend while safeguarding results, you’re in for a long-term game.

However, with a little perseverance and lots of attention to detail you can make your Adwords budget go a lot further.

Is your Google Adwords campaign running at peak performance?

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