Advertising your site with pay per click (PPC) marketing can be an extremely financially-rewarding method of generating more income.  Whether you’re new to PPC or you’re a seasoned expert, one of the easiest ways to realize more profits is to reduce the amount of money that you are spending on PPC.  Reducing your PPC spending sounds easy but it takes continuous tweaking and testing to keep your costs low in order to benefit from the reduced spending.  Many often take the quick and easy route of simply lowering their daily budget or maximum cost per click (CPC).  While lowering your spending will result in a decrease in costs, you are also sacrificing your exposure and volume.  For example: Instead of spending $10 per day to make $11 you are now spending $5 to make $5.50 and simply spreading your money over a longer time frame for the same results.

How can you reduce PPC costs?

There are many ways you can effectively reduce or lower your pay per click costs.  Some of these methods will work for you, and some won’t – but if you continually tweak and test your PPC campaigns you can really lower your spending and put more money in your pocket:

1. Try Different Match Types

   Test the various match types in your campaign.  In AdWords, try your keywords on broad, phrase, and exact match.  In Yahoo!, try standard and advanced options for match types.  Just trying each keyword as each match type can help lower your spending.

2. Use Negative Keywords

   You could potentially be spending hundreds or thousands of dollars on keywords that aren’t generating revenue.  Try implementing negative keywords to refine your search terms to only those that produce a positive return on your spending.

3. Increase Your Click-Through Rate

   AdWords rewards higher click-through rates with higher positions on the page and a lower cost per click.

4. Lower Your Bids

   One of the fastest and easiest ways to lower your costs is to lower your bids.  While this seems simple and straightforward, you need to approach this method cautiously, gently lower your bids, and track your results.  If you lower your bids too much you will see much lower volume for keywords that are potentially high converting for you.

5. Try Dayparting

   Different industries have different times of the day or week that convert better than others.  Try showing ads during the times that you have the most conversions to capitalize on buyer habits.

6. Increase Your Quality Score

   In AdWords (not other PPC search engines) your quality score can have a huge impact on what you are paying per click.  By getting your quality score as high as possible you can tremendously reduce your costs.

7. Keep a Tight Focus

   One of the best ways to reduce your PPC costs long-term is to keep a tight focus on your entire account.  From keywords to ads to landing pages, group similar content together to create the most relevant and targeted campaigns.

Test & Tweak

The tips above will help you get started lowering your costs for your pay per click campaigns, but it’s up to you to test and tweak each one to create a campaign that delivers the best results.  While these methods are somewhat broad in their coverage, I have used each of these ways many times to make a profitable campaign generate more revenue – or take an unprofitable campaign to profitability.