Although most people know how to navigate SEO, PPC is still kind of fuzzy. What it comes down to pay-per-click (PPC) marketing the costs seem minimal but add up quickly. To lower your cost-per-acquisition, you’ll need to consider your options from a variety of angles.
Change How You Bid
SEO consulting will take you far in terms of working with your key business goals. Don’t let your SEO consultant go before discussing whether you should work with automatic or manual bidding. Your bidding efforts can cost you a lot of money if mishandled. You’ll want, and that usually works best with manual bidding.
Automatic bidding is more popular because of the set it and forget about its strategy that appeals to many busy business owners. The downside is that AdWords will adjust your bids to accomplish whichever objective is easiest for it to attain. So, it’s lazy marketing in the hands of lazy software. But for people with a very direct or niche product, this isn’t a problem.
Manual bidding requires some work but give you a lot more control over your spending. You can bid in a way that ensures the maximum CPC. You can also review all of your historical data and performance records.
Know Your Quality Score
AdWords assigns a number called a quality score to keywords. The score ranges from 0 to 10, and you’ll want to get rid of anything below a 7. The keywords with a 10 are the most relevant for your content or niche. The quality score will help you get the most bang for your buck.
If your quality scores are low, you might want to brainstorm on alternative keywords that your customers would be more likely to use. For example, the use of “handbag” where “purse” or “bag” might be more commonplace.
Match Your Keywords
Content is king, but without a context it’s useless. If your AdWords aren’t using the same keywords as the content on your pages, then it’s no wonder your cost-per-acquisition is unreasonably high.
Match your keywords to lower your CPA and connect your Ad copy to your pages. You’ll want to see AdWords highlighting the keywords and letting them stand out, so when someone clicks to your site no surprises are waiting for them!
Another way that you’ll want to match your keywords it to optimize your pages independently. Your home page should address all the major drivers for your customers. What they need, why they’re there, and where the can find what they’re looking for. But each page should address that specific product or service and nothing else.
Hello Simon,
Why you didn’t include Social Media in this article? I think, people are more investing on Social Media for client acquire.
Hi Larry – fair question! I cover SM in bucketloads elsewhere on my site. However, no reason why I shouldn’t recognize it in this post. Thanks