Establish Clear Campaign Objectives: As with any marketing strategy, it is important to understand exactly what you are trying to get out of the effort. Are you looking to drive more traffic? Find a new target audience? Regardless of your objectives, make sure that you define them before you begin creating ads so that they can be better targeted to produce the results you want.
Do Extensive Keywords Research: The best performing Google Adwords campaigns are the ones that focus on high search volume, low competition keywords and phrases. Longer, low competition keywords perform much better than more generic terms with higher competition. Use keyword tools like Google's keyword tool to find the right keywords and phrases to bid on.
In order to manage PPC costs, create your ads as exact match. This helps not only to control your PPC costs, but will also bring highly targeted traffic to your site. These visitors are more likely to convert into sales.
Avoid Dynamic Search Ads: Exact match ads only appear on websites when and end user enters the exact keyword or phrase you are promoting. Dynamic ads show up anytime someone searches for anything related to the content on your site. You wind up with a lot of clicks that don't result in sales, driving up the cost of your campaign.
Create a Bidding Strategy: Never let Adwords automatically adjust your bid. Enter your big manually and bid according to the location that you are trying to target. You can review Analytics information to see where your previous traffic originated from. You can adjust your bid during your campaign and lower it as you reach your daily budget in order to control costs without impacting the performance of the ad.
Target Your Competitors Head-on: You can use the name of industry leaders as your keyword in order to get impressions. Don't use their name in your ad as this might violate copyright laws and invite a potential lawsuit. Make sure that you are clear in your advertising so that those who click understand where they are going and what they will see to avoid high bounce rates.
Check for Overlapping Keywords: By using keywords that overlap for different campaigns, they begin to compete with each other and can throw a monkeywrench in your campaign. For example, "car detailing NC" and "detailing NC" in different campaigns overlap and can drive up costs by triggering two ads for one search and one customer.
And these are just a few tips you can use to control the costs associated with your Google Adwords campaign while boosting their effectiveness.