I have a dentist client who wanted to reduce his ad costs and the same time he wants to maintain a consistent presence on Google using Adwords. We explored several possibilities and ended up choosing the solution below.

We explored his keywords, hundreds of them and probably similar to your Adwords account we found that keywords have different levels of return on investment. We then identified the most profitable keywords from the least profitable keywords. After categorizing the keywords my client wanted to maintain the ad rank of the most profitable keywords at position 2 and lower the ad rank of the rest of the keywords to allow us to get the highest probability of conversions and reduce the cost of his Adwords campaign.

This is how we separated the keywords.

Level 1: converting keywords 20% of the keywords that produced 80% of the leads
Level 2: the rest of the keywords 80% of them producing 20% of the leads
Level 3: older keywords that never converted and possibly candidates for deletion
Level 4: new keywords for testing

After identifying these levels we assign a desired rank for each keyword level to maximize our advertising budget. Do note that we had to test different positions for each level to arrive to our ideal return on investment. 

This was our initial test setup:

Level  1 keywords will maintain position 2
Level 2 keywords will maintain position 2.5
Level 3 keywords  will maintain position 3.5
Level 4 keywords will maintain position 2.25 (after sometime these keywords will move into level 1, 2 or 3.)

With this idea, we couldn’t use any existing Adwords functionality to achieve this goal, so we created the Bid to Position Adwords script so that we can tag each keyword in his account and tell the script what position we’d like the script to move the keyword to and maintain its position(ad rank) there.

The Bid to Position Adwords script will check all the keywords with the bid2pos label and process these keywords 3 times a day to attempt to maintain the keyword position as much as possible. So the next thing we had to do was to tag level 1 keywords with the label bid2pos=2, this tells the Bid to Position Adwords script that this keyword needs to move to position 2, so the script will check it’s average position if it’s average position is higher than 2 the script will apply a modifier to the current bid to decrease its rank. And the opposite is true if the average position is lower than 2 the script will apply a modifier to the bid to increase its rank.

The result of this strategy is that we were able to reduce the cost over time and still maintain a good number of leads coming in since the presence of the ads shows up more often and it’s less expensive than the top position for those keywords. Merely adjusting each keyword at a time would have driven my client and myself crazy and wouldn't be a scalable solution moving forward.

Now take action to do this. If you know programming it’s not too hard to create the script, if not you can hire someone to build the script for you, maybe pay them $30-$60/hour to build it and shouldn’t take them more than 3-4 hours to build and test the script although they do need to know a little bit of adwords scripting.

Or just get my Bid to Position Script below.

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