Those who start marketing with pay per click campaigns are taking a gamble. You have to know when to up the ante and you have to know when to fold those cards. You’re paying a fee with the hopes that you’ll earn an affiliate commission or product sale. Here are some tips that can help you maximize your chances of keeping costs low and conversion high.

Work on your PPC quality score

Google assigns a quality score based on many factors and working to keep your score high will keep your placement good and your minimum bids low. Google wants to maintain integrity of the program so they look at your ads, your conversion rates, your keyword relevancy and other factors in determining your score.

Long tail instead of short tail

Choose ad groups, optimize ads and SEOize your web copy for long tail keywords. This will get you a better quality score and will attract more targeted prospects than simply optimizing for short tail keywords.

Customize landing pages

A good way to customize your landing page is to ensure the keyword people are searching on is in the URL and on the page. A tool like SpeedPPC (reviewed by Matt Bredel here: SpeedPPC Review and discussed here: 7 Ways SpeedPPC Can Save You Time / Money) offers customized landing pages which adds keywords to the page and the URL. This helps not only the search engines see that you’ve got relevancy but helps your prospects feel like they’ve landed somewhere related to their keyword search and this can help you convert better.

Diversify and test

Look closely at your reporting to determine whether or not your ads are effective. Instead of just running one ppc ad campaign to see how things pan out, consider running multiple campaigns on various keywords and by utilizing varied ad strategies. Moving around a sentence or expanding to a longer tail keyword could make a huge difference and if you’re not dabbling with a few strategies, you could give up too soon (with too much money spent.)

Can you spend a lot of money on pay per click and earn nothing? Yes.

Could you hit the jackpot?  Yes!  Knowledge, tools, and sound advice can help you tip the scales in your favour!