If you’re using Microsoft Ads, there’s a near 100% chance that you’re overpaying for your CPC (clicks) and there’s very simple ways you can not only reduce that cost significantly but also maintain a high level of quality clicks and increase conversions.
Just how much extra are you spending on Microsoft Ads?
How much you are overpaying on your clicks varies, but in my experience, the average person who uses Bing Ads is suggested to spend about $0.30 minimum on their clicks when they make ads, while other more targeted niches and ads may easily bring up that cost to $1 or more.
I’ve even talked to people who have said Bing Ads suggest they spend $5 or more per click. No thanks.
How much I’m spending on my CPC with Bing Ads (on average):
90% of the ads I run, I easily end up spending under $0.10 a click, and again, while getting targeted clicks and conversions.
In total, my revenue through using Bing Ads has easily exceeded $350,000 with around $40,000-$50,000 of that spent on clicks, so I can safely say what I am doing works, and that’s what I’ll teach you here (learn more about me).
It doesn’t matter if you’re using Bing Ads to do affiliate marketing with, or if you’re just driving traffic to a site where you sell your own product.
The rules of Bing Ads and the way I use them are set up in such a way that if you follow certain parameters, you can easily get away with spending under $0.10 like I do for each click, and all that saved money will equate to larger profit margins.
In fact, I am almost certain that right now, if you’re using Bing Ads, most of the clicks you’re getting are junk and could easily be omitted to save you money.
Here are the 5 rules I follow to keep my Microsoft Ads (Bing Ads) costs low:
- Make sure your Bing Ad is aligned with your landing page and keywords.
- Do not listen to what Bing Ads suggest you bid. Bid low ($0.10), always.
- Target specific niche keywords to ensure low costs.
- Do not stack all your keywords into 1 adgroup, segment them intelligently.
- Only target keywords that have exact and phrase match (never broad).
I’m about to get into each of these rules. Before I do, let me say that in my case, I use Bing Ads to do affiliate marketing with and if you’re new to this realm (affiliate marketing or Bing Ads in general), read my guide to using Bing Ads to do affiliate marketing on here, because it will literally show you step by step things such as:
- How to pick a product to promote.
- How to set up your ad.
- How to set up your keywords so you pay little.
- How to get a lot of clicks, a high quality score and more.
- In short, it’s going to include all of the above tips I’m giving you here, but in more detail.
With that said, let me get into the details of each tip if you’re just looking for that and not a whole long guide on the subject:
1) Align your Bing Ads with your landing page and keywords (this helps lower CPC):
I’d say 99% of Bing Ads users, as well as anyone who does pay per click marketing makes this mistake. They try to promote some sort of product, create an ad for it (it usually sucks) and then stuff the keyword section with random keywords that have little or no relevancy to what they’re selling.
Then they just accept the fact that Bing Ads determines their CPC to be very high and just take it. This is not the way it should be done!
Every single ad I make, I ensure the following things are present:
- My ad must be aligned with my landing page.
- My keywords must be used on the landing page as well as in the ad targeting section.
So as an example, here’s the wrong way to do this:
You target a weight loss product and bid regular “weight loss fast” type keywords on Bing Ads. Then your landing page is some sort of product promotion that doesn’t really align with any of this (could be some sort of fat loss pill).
The problem is that all across the board, this entire set up is flawed from the start, it’s too vague and it’ll jack up your CPC too much, and give you very little conversions. If there’s one thing I see done wrong by people on Bing Ads, its this.
And here’s an example of the right way to do this:
You target a specific weight loss product, and then set up a landing page reviewing that specific weight loss product, and in the keywords section of your ad, you insert those keywords, so only the audience who knows about this product sees the ad. That’s how you get targeted clicks that convert into sales!
What if this doesn’t get clicks? Then do this:
You’re going to want to target a niche audience, not a product in that case that would LOVE the product. Then you’ll make a landing page targeting the niche audience, as well as they keywords they’re looking for and pitch the product to them in the landing page. That way you get niche audiences looking for a specific product to help them, but they don’t know of any options, not until your landing page shows them that option.
For example:
If you target a weight loss product called “Vitaliy’s super duper diet” which shows people how to lose weight with say intermittent fasting, and no one’s ever heard of that, it obviously won’t get clicks if you make an ad targeting the diet name or it’s related keywords, BUT if you find a niche of people who know about intermittent fasting and make an ad that says something like:
This is the #1 intermittent fast diet and it points to a landing page talking about how awesome of a plan Vitaliy’s Super Duper Diet is for intermittent fasting, you’re likely to get clicks and sales for that because there is good relevant flow.
What I’m basically doing with all of this is creating a highly profitable online sales funnel and you’ll notice that in that link I just provide, every example I use is highly aligned from the beginning of the sales funnel to the end of it.
2) Never pay what Bing Ads tells you to pay (bids):
While every PPC network’s suggestions on what to bid for your keywords usually will get you clicks, you’ll likely be overpaying for it. I always set my bids to be at $0.10, and then I’ll run the ad for about a week and see if there’s clicks and impressions.
If I get low clicks and high impressions, I’ll increase the CPC to $0.20. And again, I’ll only do this if the impressions are high and the clicks are low. This is because high impressions means that my keyword is being typed in but my ad position is too low for users to see, in which case, increasing it incrementally will help.
Your goal is to get your ad to show up in the top 3 positions of ads:
The easy way to understand this image above is this:
If I have keywords with a lot of impressions, but my AVG position for them (ads) is over 3.00, it means I need to raise my bids ($0.10 increments), and I’ll do it every 7 days until the AVG position is under 3.00 which means my ads rose higher to show up for all those impressions (which will get me clicks).
3) Target specific niche keywords (this makes sure your Bing Ads costs lower):
This is very related to tip 1. If you’re bidding on basic, broad keywords like:
- How to make money.
- Health products.
- Weight loss.
You can be sure your CPC with Bing Ads is going to be $1 or more per click. And this is because tons of other advertisers are bidding on the exact same keywords (they are foolish for doing so by the way). Never target these types of keywords because of how vague they are.
Instead target specific keywords with longer, more specific meanings:
- Specific product names
- Specific niche audiences that look for a specific solution
So for example:
- Vitaliy’s super duper diet is specific.
- Intermittent fasting, and top intermittent diets is specific.
You’ll end up spending way less on these specific keywords than on the broad ones. 10X more in many cases (I’m not kidding).
4) Never stack all of your keywords into 1 adgroup. Segment them:
What a lot of people do is they’ll take a broad topic like weight loss, make an ad on it and steer people into a landing page that isn’t specific (tons of mistakes right there). But added to it is that for the keywords section of Bing Ads, they’ll insert dozens if not 100’s of keywords that target all sorts of weight loss topics, and that will make it nearly impossible to get a good click through rating (CTR) and it will also reduce your quality score and jack up your costs.
You’re going to want to make segments of adgroups, and each one should have a common keyword in them. For example:
If I want to promote Vitaliy’s Super Duper Diet, I won’t target keywords that mix both the name of the diet and intermittent fasting. Instead, I’ll make 2 adgroups:
- One that only targets keywords that say stuff like Vitaliy’s Super Duper diet
- And another adgroup that targets keywords like “Intermittent fasting”.
Doing this, I have more freedom to make a good looking ad (2 of them) and use the keywords in them to get a higher click through. And it will raise my quality score. There is no limit to how many adgroups you can create and speaking from personal experience, I’ve had campaigns on Bing Ads with 100’s, yes 100’s of adgroups in them. Segmenting properly ensures low costs and targeted clicks (See above).
5) Always target keywords with the [exact] and “phrase” matches:
I don’t know of any PPC network that tells people about this but this is one of the most important tips you’ll ever hear on saving on PPC costs and getting quality traffic, and increased conversions:
Never target broad keywords. Always target exact and phrase. What this means is when I set up my keywords on Bing Ads, I’ll set them up like this:
“Vitaliys Super Duper Diet” and [Vitaliys Super Duper Diet]
“Intermittent fasting” and [Intermittent fasting]
I will never use those keywords without the quotes or brackets and what this will do is it’ll ensure that my ads only get triggered for those specific keywords. If I were to go broad (no brackets or quotes), my ads could appear for things like:
- Fasting.
- Intermittent.
- Diet.
- Super.
And those keywords on their own lack context ENTIRELY. If people who type those one word keywords into Bing get my ad, it will start showing diluted impressions and get diluted clicks (bad quality traffic). I will likely get the clicks, but I sure won’t get any conversions from them, so don’t make this mistake!
These 5 tips will not just ensure lower costs on Bing Ads, but also higher conversions:
Targeted traffic is always the profitable one and by sticking to the 5 rules above, I’ve been able to get that kind of traffic, not just to my ads on Bing, but also to my blogs, my YouTube videos and so forth.
Do not think that just because you pay more to get more clicks that this will increase your profits. In 90% of cases, it’s the opposite story.
By properly using these 5 steps and getting experienced at doing so, you will be able to drive high quality traffic to any page you want and that will greatly help you get more sales and conversions.
Want to see more tutorials like this? Here’s some other popular ones:
The best PPC networks to do affiliate marketing on. I show people the different types of PPC networks available for affiliate marketing (and traffic generation in general).
How to reduce YouTube Ad costs. This post shows very similar ways to reduce your PPC costs, but on YouTube Ads.