It’s not that PPC advertising itself is a waste of money (it isn’t!), but not properly optimizing your advertising campaign could be costing you more than you need to spend.

If you are using PPC, you can utilize targeted keyword phrases to ensure your advertisements are only seen by the voters you want. Negative phrases, or keywords, are words or phrases that a person searches where you don’t want to make your ad show up.

For example, suppose you are targeting the term ‘Supervisor for TinyTown’. Your ad will probably appear for searches related to ‘TinyTown Supervisor Election’ and so on.

But what about searches for ‘supervisor jobs’ or ‘supervisor training’? Those terms are not related to your race, and anyone that clicks on your ad will not find what they are looking for. Wasted click, wasted money. When you ads appear for irrelevant searches, they will most likely not be clicked and therefore reduce the click through rates (CTR) of your ads. Thus directly affecting your ad’s quality score and will raise the overall cost per click. (Simply put, the more relevant your ad is on Google Adwords, the less you tend to pay per click.)

Here are two ways to improve your campaign’s Adwords account. When you AdWords ad groups are optimized, you’ll save money on irrelevant clicks, improve your ad click-through rate and lower your overall cost per click. Why spend more money than you need?