Paid Search – Are You Paying Too Much?

Have you got an active paid search campaign running as you read this article? Have you wondered what you should really be paying when it comes to your Google, Yahoo, Bing or Facebook Ads? If you have got a campaign and never thought much about what you are paying, it could be costing you more than you expect!

In recent months we have seen quite a few businesses starting to tighten their advertising belts more and more. One area which they have done this in particular is with their websites and their paid search campaigns. While this for an e-commerce site is typically a big no no. The fact still remains that they may not actually be getting a good deal when they decide to advertise again.

The biggest contributor to higher paid search costs is usually self management. While people would tend to say “Well I would prefer to manage it myself” the truth is they are not the ones who actually work on campaigns daily, let lone across multiple industries.

This means that they may not actually see ways to save costs or have the right keywords getting the best results in the list of keywords that they are bidding on. How does this relate to the bottom line? Well a great example we saw recently was from a new client who had been managing their website and advertising campaign for 12 months.

To keep it confidential we will change the keywords but keep the bidding price the same. The industry was not all that small and it was not overly competitive online. There was approximately 200 products that this client supplies to the marketplace. Their biggest keyword that they were bidding on was “Discount Table Tennis Balls” and the cost per click was $1.24 per click. They had been using this as their main keyword to chase in their paid search campaign for over 12 months. In that time it was estimated that each day they would spend around $20-$30 per day. With that they had an average of 2 or 3 sales. This in turn means they were paying around $9,000 per year in paid search for this keyword phrase.

We advised them that it could be a little high for the little return on investment they were getting. We suggested that we got our Adwords Professional to have a chat to them about their campaign. They were a little reluctant to do it but they agreed. Upon talking to them they decided that they should consider the fact they could be paying too much for not too well targeted keyword phrases.

The Adwords Professional did some research and discovered that if the customer targetted “Discount Table Tenis Balls” they would not only save themselves 80 cents per click but they would also increase the amount of people potentially clicking on the ad.

Some 3 weeks on the sales rate has tripled and further to that their cost per click has dropped by almost half. From these great results the client has now decided to go ahead and get all of the paid search campaigns they have running reviewed and they even admitted “we should have got this looked at a long time ago”.

If you have any cost per click advertising going on with your website you should get it reviewed as often as you can or even get a professional to maintain it for you. Suncoast Web Solutions works with Paid Search Professionals and can help you get your campaign back on track. To find out more call us today on 07 5479 3888.