Looking for champagne results on a beer budget?

This is a great way to drive massive, highly relevant PPC traffic without the normal associated price tag.

When the adwords system was first introduced back in 2000, pay per click (PPC) marketing was in its infancy.

This meant that it didn’t require a big budget or too much know how or creativity to enjoy good ROI.

Back then you could bid on generic keywords such as “bicycle“, “notebook” or “credit card” and with a simple ad and landing page, good profits would start to flow.

Today, a decade later, the industry has come of age and with this growth has come the growth of cost per click.

Nowadays, competitive keywords can be costly. Check out the average Adwords CPC on these phrases:

school loan consolidation $69.16
college loan consolidation $68.35
car insurance quotes $66.88
school consolidation $66.29
auto insurance quotes $65.90

Unfortunately, these figures came from 2008 and like inflation, they aren’t coming down.

Some New York professionals have ascended into the 3 figure click cost category. Hey, take it easy on your click trigger finger if you’re looking for a lawyer in New York! Well, I guess they can afford it.

Let’s have a look at some figures from today. We’ll assume that you’re spying out the often lucrative credit card offerings market.

1. "Credit Card"

OK, $11.86 ain’t too bad. But if you’re tight on nickel or your conversion rate and/or profit ratio isn’t out of this world, it probably wouldn’t pay to gamble here.

But this is what many newbies do. They start bidding on the most common and expensive keywords and wonder why their ads won’t show up. Frustrated, they boost their bid price and blow their budget without any return. Perhaps you’ve heard a few of those “Adwords chews you up and spits you out!” rumors floating around the traps?

Let’s try and get into something a little less savage on the wallet. We want to try and make money, not throw it away!

How about, “credit card new york”?

2. Credit Cards New York

Hmmmmm $7.62. Well, at least it’s heading in the right direction.

With a little bit of sniffing around and a little bit of digging, look what we found today:

3. Low

You little beauty! Please forgive our unbridled enthusiasm but at 5 – 9 cents a click we can pull 100 times the traffic for the same 100 bucks that would have gotten us 10 visits bidding on “credit card“. It’s 10 visits or 1000…. Your call.

You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to realize there’s something here but whilst these gems exist, they can be a little hard to find.

This is where a tool like SpeedPPC can help. “Oh no, this is a sales pitch after all” I hear you groaning. Hang on, there’s great value here. You can do this manually… If you’ve got a few free months to spare.

What’s wrong with this picture? The thing with these keywords is that they are low in cost but also low in search volume. As in the pic above, these guys pulled approximately 58 – 140 searches in the USA during December 2009.

Now let’s round them off by supposing that they each average 100 searches a month. Can you handle that? We’ll also assume a CTR of 5% (quite possible with relevant ad text in this often forsaken environment).

To get your 10,000 visits for just $700.00 (based on your 7 cent CPC average), you will need… Hang on, we’ll need the iphone to figure this out….

That’s…

5 clicks a month per ad so …

10,000 divided by 5% = 2000.

What’s that? 2000 ads? This means setting up 2000 bid prices with different match types, creating thousands of unique ads that mirror the keywords used by the user and let us not forget, 2000 landing pages parroting the users search terms in the page title, meta tags, keywords and body content. That’s best practice. Not much fun for 5 clicks a month hey?

By the way, it’s been determined that relevant, descriptive phrases tend to convert better than the general, generic phrases do.

When you think about it, a home recording studio buff searching for a new set of speakers would more likely search “yamaha ns-10 studio monitors” than “stereo speakers”. Why? Not because they sound good, they sound lousy but because they’re an industry standard studio monitor.

A relevant PPC ad is going to appeal to his or her click finger before ‘loud speaker‘ ever could. This is probably why descriptive, relevant ads tend to pull better CTRs.