Effective Pay-per-Click Without Draining Your Budget

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Among the tools many marketers use today are pay-per-click ads through vehicles such as Google AdWords. While we all strive to avoid the need to pay for high search rankings by optimizing our site pages using best-practices SEO (search engine optimization), there are times when you need to be at the top and are willing to pay for the visibility.

You only need to look at your account balance on a daily basis to see it dwindle rapidly. Whether it's $5 per day or $500, there never seems to be enough money in your account to handle your click traffic. If you've done your homework, you're doing all the right things to make sure people are clicking on you for the right reasons, and your PPC dollars are well spent.

However I see many companies and organizations completely unaware that they can optimize and manage their online spend much more efficiently. Here are a few simple approaches to make sure you're getting the most from your PPC campaign budget:

1. Determine a seasonal sales cycle. Do you really need to be running a campaign during a slow sales season? Or, could your cash be better used by moving it to a competitive month where you know customers are researching, looking and buying? For example, there are specific times throughout the year in higher education where students are checking-out potential colleges. Why not determine those "seasons" and make sure you've got enough budget to have great visibility when they're in their search?
   
   
   
2. Create very tight and specific keywords. You would be surprised at how many marketing departments use such broad words to describe their products or services. This not only can drive-up irrelevant traffic to your site (erroneously inflating your traffic stats) but if you've got a PPC campaign running, cost you a lot of money. Be sure to do a thorough examination of the specific terms your customers use to find your products. "Light bulb" may indeed apply to what you sell, but "outdoor replacement sodium vapor bulb" will be a much more appropriate keyphrase to buy in your campaign, and assure you're getting the right leads.
   
   
3. Set daily spend targets, and monitor. Avoid putting money into your PPC "bank" and letting it run. That's like putting your credit card into a slot machine and playing until your funds are depleted. By setting a cap on how much you want to spend on any given day, you can be sure you'll have enough of your budget on-hand to last throughout your campaign. By regular monitoring of those funds along with the results from clickthroughs, you can adjust the amount you spend according to your creative (you do run more than one creative for a keyphrase, don't you?), day-of-week, user interest and clickthrough popularity.
   
   
4. Are weekends working? Why are you paying for visibility on a day when all of your target customers are at the beach? Sure you may get some clicks on a Sunday, but depending on your business or product line, it might be best to "turn-off" your PPC campaign on days when most of your customers are traditionally not online, or not thinking of business.
   
   
5. Daypart your spend. Bet you didn't know you could do this, huh? Yes, you can turn-on and off your PPC campaign by the time-of-day, too. Many people I've worked with simply "buy" Monday-through-Friday and find their dollars all used up by Wednesday morning. Even if you're buying a "day" you can often find yourself out of funds by Noon. Why? Well you may have clickthroughs coming from the eastern U.S. at 7am, and by the time the west coast wakes up, your funds for the day may be depleted. Research and consider when interest levels in your product or company peak, and be sure to anticipate that interest in your PPC campaign, and remember to consider time zones (even across the globe, if you deal internationally).
   
   
6. Monitor. This is one of the most important things you can do, yet many managers place the buy and only look at the traffic or sales. By its nature, a PPC campaign can be adjusted on-the-fly at any time. See what creative is working (do A/B testing). Know when to bulk-up your spend, and when to throttle back. Experiment. Try something new. But watch the indicators to see how you're doing. This is one of the greatest benefits of an online campaign; the ability to watch performance and make instant modifications to optimize results.

A pay-per-click campaign, for the right reasons, may bring you the results you need in the short term. Make sure you're doing all you can to use your funds wisely, so that every dollar spent is one that brings in a high return on investment!

© 2011 Bob Chernet - View all of Bob's articles at: Bob Chernet's Marketing Best Practices . Reproduction of Bob Chernet's Marketing Insights in any manner is unlawful, without the written permission of the author.