How to Pay Less for Keywords in PPC Campaigns
Posted: May 24th, 2008
As small business owners and campaign managers well know, pay per click campaign budgets aren’t as liberal as we would like them to be. Fortunately, there are ways to pay less for your chosen keywords and while maintaining (or bettering) your ads’ visibility, click-through rate, and the overall ROI.
Keyword Matching Options
For the most part, you should stray from the default of broad matching keywords. With broad match, you can easily be paying for clicks and traffic from people outside of your target market. Phrase match is generally the matching option you’ll want to use for your average ad campaign. You might also find exact match and negative match to be useful for certain products, services, and/or promotions.
I’ll go deeper into keyword matching options in a later post.
[Update: Implementing Keyword Matching Options]
AdWords Quality Score
Another way to pay less for keywords and optimize the effectiveness of your PPC campaign budget is by improving your Quality Score. You can do this by improving the click-through rates (CTR) of your ads, and showing relevancy between these ads and their respective landing pages.
Ad click-through rates can be increased by writing more engaging ad copy, and can be optimized through A/B split testing or multivariate testing.
More on these subjects in a later post too. 
As for landing pages, try to include the keywords you’re bidding on in the ads, landing page URLs, and in the content of the landing pages themselves. The load times of your landing pages are also taken into account now and factors into your Quality Score.
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