Control cost of ads

With cost-per-click (CPC) advertising on AdWords, the cost of your campaigns really depends on you -- how much you're willing to pay and how well you know your audience. It all boils down to knowing your own goals and letting us know what they are.

Set your own limits: There is a nominal activation fee for Google AdWords. After that, you tell us how much you're willing to pay per click and per day. Learn more about selecting your CPC and daily budget.

Start smart: Don't bid more than you can afford. If you're unsure what to pay per click to acquire a new customer, we help you by giving you cost estimates, specific to your campaign settings, during the sign-up process. In addition, if the maximum CPC you elect doesn't meet the minimum bid required for your ads to show, we'll let you know. You can either raise your CPC to the minimum bid or optimize your keywords, ad text, or campaign settings for quality. Learn more

Grow from what works: Once you know what works, you can start to build more campaigns and ad groups to attract your potential customers. In addition, keyword-targeted ads earn their position based on their maximum cost-per-click (CPC) and Quality Score (quality of your ad) on Google. By creating more relevant and targeted ads, you could end up paying less to maintain the position of your ads.

Pay less for more results: Keep in mind that because of our AdWords Discounter and dynamic ranking system based on your maximum CPC and Quality Score, your actual CPC (what you actually pay per click) is often less than your maximum CPC (what you're willing to spend per click) and often decreases when your ad starts to perform better. Remember: The higher the quality of your ad, the lower its actual CPC.

You may also wish to enable the content bids feature, which lets AdWords advertisers set one price when their ads run on Google and its search partner sites, and a different price when their ads run on Google Network content sites. You can learn more about content bids at our help center.

In addition to daily budget, maximum CPC, and quality -- which directly control your costs -- keywords and targeting are important factors to consider.

Keywords: We suggest you start off with just a small list of strong keywords and a few different targeted ads. This will help save you money by reducing the number of untargeted clicks, which are unlikely to convert to sales. Using keyword matching options also helps you manage your costs by limiting your ads to the most relevant searches and content pages.

Targeting: Your CPC is partly based on what your nearest competitors are willing to pay, so targeting your ads to your specific market ensures that you're competing in the right market and paying only what you need to pay. Effective targeting is accomplished through keywords, ad text, and language and location targeting settings. Learn more