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I have had several conversations recently with managers in E-commerce departments who want to lower their Google pay-per-click costs and increase the ROI on their campaigns. I have a simple but often overlooked answer:

Do search engine optimization on your sales pages and segment your PPC campaigns so that each keyword group goes to a webpage that is optimized for that group.

Why SEO lowers Google PPC costs

Google prides itself, and in fact, bases it’s search business on the idea that relevance matters. They want you to keep returning to their search engine because it gives you the most relevant results for your keyword search. And they do their best to clearly label “organic” or natural search results from “paid” or PPC results. Go to a search engine that mixes up paid and search results or doesn’t let you know what is paid and what is not. How does it make you feel when you search? Annoyed? Don’t know if you can trust the results? Google tries to avoid that at all costs.

And that leads to a key factor in lowering pay-per-click costs: Google’s desire for serving relevant results also applies to their paid results.

Let’s say that you are bidding on the keyword “back pain.” If you send your visitors to a page that talks about sciatica and chiropractic care you will pay more per click than if you sent them directly to a page that speaks about back pain.

Do you see why? Google wants you to send people to pages immediately and directly relevant to keywords that the person is searching. And even without the lower price you would be doing better. Why? When you give a searcher what they want, they are more likely to buy and stay on your website. The take home message is simple: Do SEO for the keyword that you are targeting.

Keyword Segmentation for Lowering PPC costs

Understanding keyword relevance and its relation to buyer motivation is another way to lower pay-per-click costs. Segment your campaigns into related keyword groups and send people to a web page optimized for that keyword. For example, a person searching for “lower back pain relief” is likely to have different motivation and wants than someone searching for “kidney back pain relief.” If you send each person to a page relevant to the keyword searched, google will reward you with a lower pay-per-click charge. And again - you will be sending someone to a page that is more likely to give them what they want and thus be more likely to gain a customer.

Also note that a more inclusive term like “back pain” is harder to optimize for buyer motivation. Yes, you can optimize for back pain and save some money on click costs, but what in the world is the person trying to find with the keyword? Relief? Medical Advice? An exercise device? Information for a term paper? You don’t really know and you are likely to pay for tons of irrelevant clicks.

I hope that was useful. Bye for now - Ryan

Adwords: How to Pay For Useless Clicks

What follows is a recent experience using google and noticing how several companies were wasting ther money and my time on poorly designed adword campaigns.

I was doing a brief search on google for a free webinar hosting service. Free, yes, free. I wanted to try out a Webinar service and not pay for the trial.

A webinar (if you don’t already know) is an online seminar or workshop hosted through the web. There are a variety of different services, but what I wanted was a way to show some powerpoint slides to my participants as well as show some software applications. My participants would be online, on their computer and following along, asking questions as needed.

After typing in “free webinar” the results appeared on google. There was a pay-per-click ad for a company called Webex near the top of the page. The title read, quite clearly:

Free Webinar
Reach hundreds of people at once. Host a Webinar with Ease. Try It!

After clicking the ad, I could see nothing free and no free trial or free account so I left. I then clicked another ad and had a similar result. Both these companies paid for a click that - by definition - could do them no good. They are wasting money. If they (or their consultants) knew what they were doing, they would put a “negative keyword” in their google adwords campaign. This would make it so that their ad would not show up when someone types in the word “free.”

Think about it. If someone is not looking to buy something from you or your company do you really want to be paying to bring them to your website?! I sure as heck don’t. I made a similar mistake a year ago and it cost me several hundred dollars. Webex is probably wasting several hundred dollars every week.

The next ad that I clicked said:

Your operating system is incompatible with our service. You will need Windows.

Fair enough. So next, I typed in “Free Webinar Mac.” And again I clicked on several ads that said “Your operating system is incompatible with our service.” Another great example of wasted money and time.

If their Webinar system is not compatible with a Macincosh Operating System, then they should probably not be paying for clicks that bring Mac users to their website, do you agree?

Adding some negative keywords, such as “Mac, macintosh, apple” will save these companies from paying for useless clicks. This will increase the effectiveness of their adwords campaigns, save them $$$ and help give them a positive return-on-investment or ROI.