Leverage Information from Google to Lower the Cost of Your PPC Bids

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by Jennifer Laycock

One of the nice things about Google's somewhat complicated paid search advertising system is that as time passes, they give advertisers more and more information about their campaigns. While it takes time to learn how to read and interpret this information, doing so can go a long way toward helping you maximize your campaign performance while minimizing the amount of money you spend on it.

That's what Joe over at Adventures of PPC Hero helps you do in yet another excellent post on Google's AdWords Quality Score and the AdWords reporting system.

Joe writes:

...over the past year Google has been lifting the thick veil that hides the mechanics of the Quality Score in order to give advertisers more visibility as to how their keywords are scored. Recently, Google AdWords made another leap forward in helping PPC managers get a better grasp on the Quality Score.

If you have run a keyword/placement report within AdWords recently, you'll notice that you can now included Quality Score data as well as estimated first page bid information.

Joe goes on to offer up some great screen shots from the AdWords system and to explain how to use the information Google is giving you to get more of your ads to show on the home page. He also points out how this information can be used to lower your bids.

For one keyword, my "estimated first page bid" was $1.25 and I was bidding $2.50. So, I lowered my bid slightly because I would prefer to keep my ads in the 3-5 position and stay on the first page of results, and pay less per click.

If you've set up a Google AdWords campaign and left it to run without checking in on a regular basis, you are probably over paying for campaigns that are under performing. Take the time to learn the basics of paid search and to read more about how each engine works. Learning even just one new thing about an engine's paid search algorithm can pay off big time in terms of higher ROI.

Flickr photo from Joshua Davis via creative commons license.

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