A simple AdWords optimisation technique

This is a simple but often overlooked AdWords optimisation technique.

If you are spending your daily budget in a campaign consistently you should try lowering keyword bid prices very slightly and seeing if you still use your budget.

This is likely to get you more traffic of the same quality for a lower cost per click. So within a fixed budget you will get more enquiries and will be more profitable.

Consider a budget of £24 with clicks costing 20p. You get 120 clicks a day with an ad perhaps ranking in position 3.4.

If you reduce your bids (not forgetting that bid prices are usually higher than actual CPC figures) so that clicks cost on average 18p then if you still spend the budget you will get 133 clicks instead. In this sort of situation your ad may drop in rank from 3.4 to 4.1 but if it still gets the clicks we've done well.

These will be clicks from people searching using the same keywords as before, and so could be expected to be of a similar quality.

As with all things statistical, there are exceptions. For example, in certain markets you need your ads to rank well and dropping your bids slightly can take you down the ad ranks and out of the attention area of your prospects. The worst place this can happen is if your ad moves from being on page 1 to being on page 2.

Don't forget the bigger picture though: if you are already profitable and spending your budget, simply increasing your budget is probably going to boost your profits too because it will buy you more traffic of the same sort of quality at the same sort of price that you are already paying for.