Pay per click advertising is used by the millions worldwide for the main reason that it is a great form of advertising which delivers the results advertisers want and need. With this in mind, many advertisers think it is relatively easy to make money using PPC campaigns to generate traffic to specific landing pages. To some extent, this is true. But, to optimise a campaign to generate contextual traffic at an affordable price takes some time. PPC is all about efficient traffic generation. For this reason, here are two tips to help you save money when using PPC advertising.
 
 

#1 Going For Quantity Wastes Money

Common for first time users of PPC advertising, newbies to the online advertising platform tend to think that the more traffic you can generate from PPC, the better – unfortunately, this is usually not the case. PPC advertising will have a certain value for every click onto an advert based on many different factors: from the type of web user clicking onto the advert to the keywords they used to search and to even the geographical location of that web user.
Having more traffic is just not the best strategy in PPC. Although you will get more traffic for a lower price, the quality of that traffic, in the sense of how likely they are going to convert for you, will be relatively low.
The below is an example of the above point made (the below budget for each campaign is $1,000):

1. Campaign 1, looking for quantity, has a cost per click (CPC) of $0.30 (low CPC) and generates 3,333 clicks. The conversion rate for this traffic is 20%.
2. Campaign 2, looking for quality, has a cost per click of $0.80 (higher CPC) and generates only 1,250 clicks. The conversion rate for this traffic is 70%.

Although campaign 1 looks the better option because it produces more traffic, the number of conversions makes clear that campaign 2 is better since campaign 1 produced 667 conversions whereas campaign 2 produced 875 conversions from the same budget.
 
 

#2 Always Use Negative Keywords

It can be seen that the main area that can be optimised in PPC is with the keyword choice. At the end of the day, the keyword selection in PPC campaigns has a huge say in the actual CPC that is produced.
One way to reduce inefficient targeting is with negative keywords. These are keywords for which you do not want your campaign to target. Therefore, you are narrowing your campaign even further to view just the keywords that perform well to produce the conversion you want.
An example of this is with a PPC campaign that is trying to sell super cars. The campaign could choose to include negative keywords such as ‘economical’, ‘cheap’ and ‘family’ since these are keywords that could potentially be used alongside the main keyword ‘car’ but are unlikely to convert as well as keywords such as ‘super’, ‘sports’ and ‘fast’.