In order to make more money from your PPC advertising your first port of call should be the PPC Account History. This works very effectively when you have conversion tracking set up and especially if your business converts predominantly online.  However if you know the proportion of online and offline conversions, say for example it is 70% online and 30% offline then you can do your figures accordingly.

No-one likes to spend money unnecessarily so the immediate step to take is to identify the optimum converting position initially for the account overall.  To do this choose the All Time option inside the Google Adwords account while choosing the All Online Campaigns option which is on the left hand top of the screen, just under the reporting tab.  This will give you an immediate overview.  

The Google interface now has the option to choose Conversions Many Per click which covers conversions of customers who bought within a 30 day time period, after they clicked on your ad, using the same computer.  In some customer cases this can be double the old conversion information and is therefore extremely important.  To find this you click on Filter and Views which is on the right hand side a little under the date choice, click on Customise Columns on the drop down menu.  Then select Conv.(many-per-click), Cost/Conv (many-per-click) and Conv. Rate (many-per-click).

Now that you have this more in-depth information arrange the campaigns so that the one which has the most conversions is at the top by clicking once on the column 3 from the right called Conv. (many-per-click).  If you get the lowest first by some chance just click one more time and it will reverse.  Next study the cost per conversion which can be seen in the Cost/Conv. (many-per-click) and as you do this glance over to the column called Avg. Pos. (means average position) which is 6 columns back over to the left.

Comparing the best performing campaigns, the ones that convert most and with low cost per conversions, see if there is a trend regarding the average position.  Say for example you have two campaigns that convert a lot but one is in an average position 2 and the other in an average position 5.  If you believe that the psychology of the target audience is similar then you can consider to move the position 2 down to position 3 or 4 to begin.  Dont do anything too radical too suddenly, make the changes slowly and monitor the response.

We have seen a number of clients who truly believed that they had to be in position 1 to convert as much as possible.  However the harsh reality is that many people automatically click on the top one or two ads habitually.  When they are ready to buy it can often be an ad in a much lower position that gets their business!  By adopting this approach it is possible not only to save a lot of your PPC advertising budget purely on less expensive clicks, but if it is done correctly you will have more conversions at a lower cost per conversion.  Kind of a no-brainer as they say!