How I Cut My Clients Google Adwords PPC in Half

Often when taking over a clients Google Adwords campaign, I find that they load one Ad Group with all their keywords.  If this is you, I highly suggest you go PAUSE your campaign right now!

Before we get into how to setup your account to lower your costs, we will go over how Google decides your bid price.  If you go into your “Keywords” area, and hover your mouse over the magnifying glass to the right of the keyword you’ll see a Quality Score.

What is ‘Quality Score’ and how is it calculated?
The AdWords system calculates a 'Quality Score' for each of your keywords. It looks at a variety of factors to measure how relevant your keyword is to your ad text and to a user's search query. A keyword's Quality Score updates frequently and is closely related to its performance. In general, a high Quality Score means that your keyword will trigger ads in a higher position and at a lower cost-per-click (CPC).
-adwords.google.com

A lot of people are losing money on Google Adwords because their ads get a “Google Slap”.  A Google Slap is a bad quality score.  When Google Slaps your account you’ll have to pay more money to be able to have your ad show at the same spot that it was… say a week ago.  Having a bad quality score can cause your cost per click (cpc) to go from (this is a real example!) $0.12 a click to $1.00 a click. 

So the obvious route is to increase your Google Adwords Quality Score!  Now the fun part:

Instead of having that massive list of keywords you’ve researched (or just selected from Google) we’re going to bring that up into multiple Ad Groups.  For our example we’ll use is a company that sells blue widgets in Miami, Florida.

We need to break up that large list of keywords into related Ad Groups.  For example, the first Ad Group will be “Miami Blue Widgets” within this ad group we place all keywords with the words Miami, Blue and Widgets.

Miami Blue Widgets
Buy Miami Blue Widgets
Affordable Blue Widgets
etc.

Now the part that will help increase our quality score, ads tailored to our keywords.  This will help us in two ways one increase quality score and two bold the keywords searched.  We want the words “Miami Blue Widgets” in our headline and in our product description, if nothing else at least the headline.

Miami Blue Widgets
Make sure to check our store
before you buy Blue Widgets!

You should make three or four different ads to test which converts the best, we’ll save that for another lesson!

Now go through the rest of your keywords and lump them base on similar keywords to take advantage of keywords within your ad to boost your quality score.

If want to boost your score even more there is one more thing you can do.  Design a landing page for each Ad Group.  A good idea would be something like: www.domain.com/miami-blue-widgets.html.  On this landing page make sure to have the title and h1 tags have your keyword in it.

It may seem like a lot, but in the end these simple steps can save you hundreds of dollars.  Having targeted landing pages can also increase conversions (another post).