I say “everyone,” but maybe I should clarify: everyone who actually has something they can measure their ROI against—be it product sales, lead generation, or maybe just newsletter signups. But what if you don’t have a hard measurement—what if your aim is purely brand visibility?

How can you get your site to appear in relevant search results, not for any financial gain, but to simply achieve even more awareness and exposure for your brand?

The first and most obvious way is to ensure you always appear under your own brand name. Even if yours is a well known brand and already appearing top of the organic results, it’s worth doing. For a very cheap CPC, you can ensure you also always appear for the (often surprisingly high) number of brand variations and misspellings people will use to find you. You’ll often not show up organically for your brand misspellings (though you may find your competition is using CPC to ensure they are cashing in on your misfortune), so it’s a good opportunity to ensure you’re not missing out on potential visibility.

Utilizing the ad copy also gives a valuable opportunity to shout about your biggest unique selling propositions, latest developments, or marketing messages, perhaps sending visitors off to a specific landing page as opposed to the homepage Google may have indexed for you.

A second method is to try and appear in the search results for the many products or services your company offers. Not only is this is a great way to generate lots more traffic to your site, but it can increase your company’s image as a leader in your market.

If your company offers thousands of products, this can be no small feat and needs very tight reins to ensure that this visibility is maximized without the need for a massive budget. Here are some ways to do this:

1. Constantly adapt the keyword list to ensure you’re only paying to promote the products that your company is focusing on in any given month. This will require a close relationship with your sales / admin teams to get monthly updates.

2. Appearing anywhere in the top 4 positions is sufficient for the aims of providing both traffic and visibility. The easiest way to achieve this ranking is to use Google AdWords Editor, where you can:

• Use the “showing stats for:” option to bring up the stats for all keywords

• Sort them by “Average Position”
• Highlight all terms showing up below position 4
• Click on the “Advanced bid changes” link
• Use the option to increase all highlighted words’ CPC by 10 percent

Start with fairly low CPC across the board and repeat this process once a week, gradually increasing the bids that are falling short of the target position. You’ll find that the list of terms outside the top 4 will reduce quite quickly. Set yourself a maximum keyword CPC limit based on the budget you have available, and when that is reached you’ll be left with terms that are just too expensive and will have to be disregarded or changed to a less expensive variant.

3. You’ll have to accept that you are never going to be able to appear across all products for all searches, even when narrowed down to just your specific headings. The best option for maximizing traffic and visibility is to appear under just a couple of very broad terms for each product—use keyword tools to ascertain what prospects and customers are most likely to search for.

4. Use Exact Match or at least Phrase Match to help keep the visibility to only these core terms. Using broad match with lots of negatives is another angle to come from, but with thousands of terms it can be overly time-consuming.

5. Some keywords will get very high levels of traffic and can eat into a disproportionately large amount of your daily budget, thereby decreasing the potential exposure of all your other terms.

If this happens to you, then a quick fix is to create a separate campaign with its own capped spending amount and add the few over-performing ad groups into it. They’ll fight over this limited budget, leaving the bulk of your money for the less greedy terms.

6. There are lots of research articles out there stating that you should ideally show CPC adverts even if you are appearing high organically. That is an ideal world, but if you are looking to maximize your exposure with a limited budget then only target the areas that organic is not covering. This is one of the trickiest areas to manage, and although you can do this manually, there is a quicker way to do this.

Export all your Google campaigns as a CSV file (again, Google AdWords Editor is excellent for this) and import them into a search engine visibility tool to find out those terms with organic rankings. Export out of this tool and set all these organically appearing terms to “Paused” in the status column, which will be showing on the original exported CSV spreadsheet. Simply import this back into Google AdWords Editor and all organic terms will stop showing.

7. Using Day Parting means your adverts will only show up when your prospects and customers are typically going to be looking for these products on Google—i.e., 8am to 6pm on weekdays. This can be set up via the “Edit Campaign Settings” page and is a vital tool to help maximize the budget so it saves the exposure for when it can have the greatest impact.

Matt Lester is the Search Marketing Executive for Kellysearch.com, a comprehensive online buyers’ guide and vertical search engine, with more than two million company listings from over 155 countries worldwide.

But what you may not know yet are these ten tips that can increase the effectiveness of your CPC campaign, while also helping to keep your search engine marketing budget on track. These tips focus on Google AdWords, but many apply to CPC programs across the board.

Show when it counts. Adjust your campaign to consider user peak times. If your target audience is primarily searching for your products between 7 a.m. and 7 p.m. on weekdays, then only show your ads during these times. Within its “Edit Campaign Settings” Google has a handy option called Ad Scheduling, which allows you to automatically turn your campaigns on and off at specific times. What’s more, if there is a peak time of day when your customers tend to search then you can even up the budget at that time and lower it at others.

Choose keywords carefully. Various tools will help find specific keywords or phrases that are being used by your audience. You can pay to use tools such as Keyword Discovery, but a free and easy way to find out is to use Google’s Keyword Tool (accessible when you’re logged in to AdWords). To use it, you type in your term and the tool instantly gives you variations people have searched for, a rough idea of the number of searches, the advertising competition against those terms, and, if you add a max CPC, an estimate of the position and cost for each term.

Select longer tail terms. Another useful aspect of the Google keyword tool is that it can help you find Longer Tail terms. Longer Tail terms are ones that appeal to users searching for very niche or specific items. For example, a generic term from the B2B world would be ‘valve’. A Long Tail term would be ‘pneumatic pilot valve’. If your budget is limited, it is worth avoiding the high cost generic terms and trying to pick up traffic from people doing very specific searches. Not only will the CPC be significantly cheaper, but you’ll tend to find that prospects know exactly what they want, and the quality and number of inquiries resulting from the clicks will be much higher.

Go negative to be positive. Staying with Keywords—think negative! A lot of keywords are included in B2B, B2C, and general social searches. Appearing in the results for anything other than your target market is a waste of time and potentially a waste of money. Adding negative keywords is an ideal way to exclude your campaigns from areas that are not relevant to you and enquiries you cannot fulfill. For example, if your company sells power tools but you don’t rent them, then words like “rent,” “hire,” or “lease” would be your negative keywords.

Think seasonal. Some products are going to be more or less popular depending on certain times of the year due to holidays, weather, or major events. If your business sells seasonable products, it may be worth upping your spend in the months leading up to these high-demand times to reap the extra traffic…and profits. To the same effect, if seasonal keywords are not part of your core business, focus your energy elsewhere until the excitement (and bid price) decreases.

Ad copy is key. You’ve spent ages picking quality keywords and setting up your campaigns and hopefully now your CPC ad appears high on the Search Engines…you’re there in front of your potential customers, so don’t fall at the last hurdle. Ad copy is one of the single most important components in differentiating you from your competitor. To help improve your copy, try Google’s Dynamic Keyword Insertion Tool. Automatically adding the keyword someone searched for into the ad copy is an easy way to ensure relevancy in the eyes of both Google and users, but is no longer the most effective. This is a trick that many people already know and it is therefore overused. Try to use distinctive, even quirky, verbiage to catch your prospect’s eye. Include a major call to action; if you have a unique selling proposition or new offer, say so.

Back it up. Don’t think of your other promotions, be they offline or online, as separate entities. People may see your print ad, for example, and remember the creative and the product you’re selling but not your company name. If they typed your latest marketing slogan into a search engine, would a recognizable CPC ad appear for your company taking them to your site for more information? If not, then you could be missing out. Likewise, the only thing they may remember from your print ad or trade show booth is your company name, so make sure your ads are appearing when someone is searching for you by name (and don’t just bank on your company appearing on the first page of organic results).

Go vertical. Google AdWords allows you to display your ads across their content and partner networks. However, the content network is not always great for the B2B market, as it relies on Google understanding the contextual content of pages and then only bringing your ad back on the pages that are relevant. To make ads more effective, you can specify the sites you wish your adverts to appear on by creating a placement targeted campaign.

Another option for reaching a more focused, relevant audience is vertical search engine advertising. Because of their more segmented nature, vertical search engines reach a very targeted audience, and often produce far better quality traffic at the same or smaller spend levels than you’ll find with their general search engine counterparts.

Go local versus international. Is your business local or international? If it’s international, you may need to set up campaigns on a country by country basis and tailor your keywords and ads to the various languages, time-zones, product variations, specific landing pages, etc. Also, determine your business’s capabilities. If you can only deliver locally, there is no point displaying your ads to the whole US. Google allows you to target your ads (based on users’ IP addresses) to a named state or town, a radius around a specific location, or even a specified geographic area of your choice.

Use CPC management tools (Google AdWords). In addition to Google’s keyword tool, there are two others that are particularly helpful. The first is AdWords Editor. It’s a free tool that offers you great control over multiple and/or large campaigns. The benefits include uploading bulk campaigns and keywords, making multiple changes to any part of the campaign, getting stats across all campaigns, etc. The second tool is Google’s Search Query Performance Reports. These reports show you what people are searching for to trigger your ads, which you can then use to adapt both your CPC words and the content on your site for SEO.

Hopefully you’ve discovered a few new ideas from our list of top tips for effective CPC advertising. Adding these to your repertoire of online marketing tools can help improve your current (and future) online advertising campaigns without expending a vast amount of resources.

Matt Lester is the Search Marketing Executive for Kellysearch.com, a comprehensive online buyers’ guide and vertical search engine, with more than two million company listings from over 155 countries worldwide. The Back To Basics column appears periodically at Search Engine Land.