PPC Trick 4: Saving money by deterring tire kickers.

Have you ever been involved in sales within an offline
environment? If you have you'll understand how frustrating
"tire kickers" can be. You know those people who are just
dreamers and will never actually buy anything? They just
enjoy shopping around and wasting everyone's time.

Our online businesses are certainly not immune to these tire
kickers. In fact I reckon there are more tire kickers online
due to the nature of the web. It's so easy to jump from
store to store comparing and researching. Thankfully, in
most cases, these tire kickers don't have to waste our time.
They generally can get all the information they need from
the pages on our sites instead of having to talk with us
directly.

However, what they do is waste our money by clicking on ads
that we are paying for. So it's important that we use
strategies that will detract these people from clicking on
our ads while still attracting the serious punters. This is
especially important if we are paying a premium for the
clicks in the first place.

So how can we pre-qualify our leads to reduce our costs and
improve our ROI?

There are several strategies I have successfully used in the
past. Here are a few of them.

1) Use negative keyword matching for words like "free".

2) Include the price in your ad.

3) Watch for keyword overlap. Are there any keywords you are
using that could be used in another completely different
market? Don't use those.

4) Don't go for number 1 position. (Look out for an email in
a few days that expands on position strategy).

5) Use regionalization and local search to get more targeted
traffic to your market.

6) Use features like Google's "Ad scheduling" to refine when
the ads are showing and how that may match your real target
audience. For example if you have a product focused at the
corporate market, then just show these ads during business
hours.

I hope they help. Don't forget to let me know if you've some
success using these strategies.