7 Simple Ways to Save Money by Auditing Your PPC Campaign

After you set up your pay-per-click campaign it’s important to regularly evaluate its performance so you know you’re getting the most bang for your buck. To really maximize every dollar spent, however, you need to go beyond simply auditing each keyword’s performance.

Here are seven simple things you can do to make sure your next PPC audit is a success:

1. Set Up Location Targeting

Every click from a prospect outside of your target location is money flushed right down the drain. Make sure that you set up location targeting, which allows you to control precisely where your ads appear. You should even look to see which location is generating the most value in order to learn where your money is best spent.

2. Add Plenty of Negative Keywords

Take a look at your search details report often to get rid of keywords that aren’t performing. Most importantly, however, you’ll want to look for keywords you don’t want ever returning your ads. For example, if you’re selling refrigerators and bid on the term ‘refrigerator’, you probably don’t want the terms ‘refrigerator repair’, ‘cheap refrigerator’ or ‘free refrigerator’ to return your ad. Adding them to your negative keyword list ensures you aren’t wasting valuable money or impressions.

3. Sort by Device

It’s important to carefully audit each keyword’s performance on both mobile and desktop devices. Depending on the type of product or service you offer, you might want to adjust your bids on mobile. Local searches perform extremely well on mobile devices. Other types of keywords might not be nearly as successful. If you’re don’t think mobile is worth your full investment, you can simply set your mobile bid modifier to a lower amount, like 50%. This ensures you’ll only pay half the amount of money for a mobile click. If you don’t think it’s worth your time at all, you can simply opt out of mobile completely.

4. Look at Ad Spend

As you’re auditing your keywords, make sure to sort them by ad spend. Look at the impressions and quality of conversions they’re generating to make sure they’re worth the money. If they aren’t, you should pump your budget into more valuable keywords and lower your bid.

5. Measure Organic Traffic

It’s important to take a look at the performance of your actual PPC campaign, but nothing helps your budget more than organic traffic. You’re already pushing people to these pages, so it shouldn’t take much more of an effort to get them higher on search engines. Optimize your landing pages and any pertinent content for search engines and use plenty of relevant keywords. If you want maximum results with minimum effort, you can leverage an SEO link building strategy for a boost.

Once you’ve attained a high position for a keyword that you are advertising for, you can remove that keyword from your Adgroup in order to save your marketing budget.

6. Take a Look at Facebook

Google cannot be ignored as a marketing platform, but plenty of studies have shown that Facebook provides a terrific return for only a minimal investment. Because Facebook has so much information at its fingertips, you can target visitors very precisely. Since it’s such a powerful mobile tool, you can drive results you might not be able to on Google, such as app downloads.

7. Look Beyond the Initial Conversion

Consider how much more cost-effective it is to retain a customer than it is to acquire a new one, taking a look at how you’re nurturing customers that convert is important. Using SMS software is a great way to do so with an incredible 95% open rate and extremely low cost per message sent. You can even feed your list with an online registration form, making it easy to maintain and build your SMS message list.

Have you conducted a successful PPC audit that helped you run a more profitable campaign? Let us know how you were able to do it with a comment below!

Sophorn Chhay is the marketing guy at Trumpia, the complete SMS software with mass SMS messaging, smart targeting and automation. Jumpstart your business by grabbing your free copy of his powerful Mobile Marketing Success Kit. Watch Trumpia’s 5-Minute Demo on how to execute an effective mobile marketing strategy.