PPC (Pay-per-Click) search marketing is a surefire way to attract and generate high-quality, responsive and sales-ready leads for your business. When planned and executed right, of course.

If you're already generating leads using PPC but are forced to find cuts in your marketing budget due to the current climate in global economy, your PPC campaigns might be the first place to look at.

Here are 4 proven tips you can use right now to optimize both your PPC spending and ROI in these challenging economic times without cutting down the flow of leads by the same percentage that it reduces your ad spend.

1) Get Rid Of Non Performing Keywords That Suck Your Budget

The simplest way to optimize your ad spending is to ditch keywords that get clicks but convert poorly or don't convert at all.

When you run a keyword performance report in your PPC engine, you'll quickly notice that the majority of your campaigns are wasting some percentage of their spend on clicks that never convert or convert very poorly.

Quick note: Keyword Performance reports give you complete and detailed insights into stats on how your keywords are performing all or selected campaigns.

So, to ensure that you spend your budget only for keywords that convert, pause or completely delete non-performing keywords.

2) Use Negative Keywords

If you're using Broad match in your PPC campaigns, big changes are that your ads are being triggered by completely irrelevant keywords that have nothing to do with the nature of your business, products or services.

When this happens, you're wasting your money - one way or another. You either waste money directly when you get irrelevant clicks that don't convert, or indirectly when you get lots of irrelevant ad impression that lower your CTR and actual cost-per-click.

Run Search Query Performance report in your PPC account to find out what actual keyword phrases are triggering your ads, driving you traffic and costing you money. Look for irrelevant keywords that trigger your ads, generate clicks, but are not converting well. Add these irrelevant keywords as negative keywords.

Quick note: A Search Query Performance report gives you insights into stats for the actual search terms that triggered your ads.

3) Split test your ads against conversion

If you're running PPC ads to generate leads, you're in the business of generating leads, not clicks or click-though rate. Thus, it makes sense to split test and optimize your PPC campaigns and ads strictly against conversions.

The main goal of your ad copy should not be to grab attention and generate as many clicks as possible, but to generate as many leads as possible. You don't want just anyone to click your ads. You want only the right people to click.

Make sure your ad copy actively qualifies your prospects before they even click your ad. For instance, if in your hunt for prospects you are looking only for companies with more than 100 employees, make sure to consider saying so in your ad copy.

4) Increase Your Conversion Rate

Increasing the conversion rate of your landing page usually turns out to be one of the most powerful ways to lower your lead acquisition costs and increase your ROI. Here's an example.

Suppose your landing page converts clicks into leads at 4% and your monthly PPC budget generates 15,000 clicks per month. This results in 600 leads per month. Now let's say you optimize and increase your conversion rate by 20% (which is usually very doable) so your landing page now converts at 4.8%.

With the exact same number of clicks (15,000 clicks per month), you're suddenly getting 720 leads per month. You would probably be happy to get those extra 120 free leads each month. Now think about how such increase would contribute to your bottom line.