Are you getting the most out of your Pay Per Click Advertising? Here are a few known – yet frequently forgotten – tips to make the most of what is left of your online advertising budget.

The Big 3: Pay Per Click

Google AdWords, Yahoo Search Marketing, and MSN AdCenter make up some of the better known pay per click opportunities that are available.

Here are a few tips that can allow you to get high quality traffic with a low budget:

1. Misspellings

Capture the visitors who typed too fast, that misheard a word, or are spelling out a keyword phonetically. Take for example the popular diet trend of “Acai Berries.” Considering people pronounce it out both “Ah-Kai” and “Ack-Sai,” you can only image how they spell it out. If you were only to bid on the high CPC keyword “Acai,’” you’d be missing out on spellings like “acsi,” “aki,” and “ac9i” (someone typing in too fast and hitting the 9 instead of “i”) that only cost $.05 per click.

There would be a bit of extra work involved in setting up a “Misspelled” keyword campaign, however, and yes, make sure to group any set of misspellings into their own ad group or campaign so that you can closely watch them. You’ll need to watch the conversion rate on the keywords to make sure that the visitor truly did mistype the word and didn’t mean something else; I’d suggest starting out using “Exact Match” for any misspelling of keywords and doing a search on each misspelling so that your ad doesn’t end up showing up for similar words or known association names and abbreviations.

On top of any misspellings that you may be aware of, you can also use SEO Book’s Typo Generator.

2. Long Tail Keywords

Most people give up on their PPC campaign after they’ve realized that hundreds and thousands of dollars have been spent but not a single click has lead to a conversion. There could be many culprits (like grouping all of your keywords into one campaign, with one ad group, that has only one ad and one landing page), but the mistake that will cost you the most money is targeting highly trafficked keywords that don’t reflect what your company actually does. Targeting the keyword “Lawyer” when you only specialize in “Family Law,” and you only work in a specific geographic location, will lead to a lot of impressions with a low Click Thru Rate (CTR) or worse yet, a high CTR with zero conversions.

Check out Google’s Keyword Search tool to find some long tail keywords that receive traffic at a lower CPC, but also scan your own site, talk to your customers to find out how they describe your business, and review your competitions website for terms you may have skipped over.

3. Local Keywords

Even if your service is available nationwide, you can still benefit from using local targeting AND local keywords. Make use of targeting specific offers to a radius of zip codes, inserting city names before or after your keyword, or split testing ads to different states.

4. Match Types

A lot of people skip this step completely when setting up their PPC campaign. You have a few keyword options, including broad, phrase, exact, and negative match. With broad match, your Ad may show up whenever Google feels that a keyword is similar to yours. It’s important to keep an eye on your analytics and to run regular reports in AdWords to find out which search queries your ad is actually showing up for. If you do notice that your ad is appearing for a keyword that isn’t relevant to your business, make use of the negative keyword option.

With phrase match, your ad will show whenever someone types in a word plus your keyword, such as “red shoes” for the keyword “shoes.”

Exact match ensures that your Ad only shows up when someone types in your keyword, word for word. While exact match may cost a bit more, the click is usually of higher quality.

For testing purposes, you can set up three different ad groups for a set of keywords, one for each match type, to find out which keyword performs the best. You may find that one match type leads to a better conversion rate, so when it comes time to trim your budget, you won’t feel bad pausing the lesser performing groups.