Tips for Decreasing Click Costs

Google received a significant amount of criticism when implementing their PPC program. Critics accused them of straying from their mission of providing quality search results as a means of making a few billion dollars. To assure quality they began rewarding advertisers whose content and ad copy were relevant to the key words they were targeting.

This concept was brought to my attention when I tried targeting the phrase “American Dental Association” to market my client’s medical financing company. The phrase only had one competitor yet Google kept making me increase my bid in order to get listed for the phrase. I called Google to investigate and the woman told me that my site and ad had nothing to do with the American Dental Association so Google implements penalties to avoid abuse of the program.

I was content on targeting this phrase so I changed the body of my ad to something along the lines of “Special Rates 4 American Dental Association Members”. I then worked the key phrase into the copy of the landing page and the meta tags. This strategy worked so well that I applied it to all of my ads. My costs for my old ads immediately went from an average of approximately $5 per click to an average of $3.50 per click.

I noticed a couple of other benefits to employing this technique. My conversion rates increased because the copy was less generic and catered to the exact phrase that the user searched for. I also noticed that these pages earned higher rankings for my organic SEO because they targeted specific key phrases and consisted of unique content.