The lower the cost per click (CPC), the greater the chances of running profitable CPC campaigns. To achieve this, you must examine your bid strategies, keywords, and landing pages more closely.
As a Google Adwords Certified Professional, I have learned over the years that running profitable PPC campaigns is not enough for PPC success. Instead, you need to focus on increasing your profit margin. This can be achieved by either making more sales (without increasing your advertising costs) or decreasing your CPC costs and, thus, advertising costs.
1. Switch to manual bidding and lower your cost per click
The easiest way to get started with bids and costs is to let Google manage them. You set a maximum daily budget (and optionally a max CPC), and Google does the rest.
This is great and works well in many situations. It is also less time-consuming since you don’t have to monitor bids and make adjustments.
If your goal, though, is lowering the costs of a campaign, then you need to switch from automatic to manual bidding and follow these simple rules:
- Start with a low cost per click. Identify the average CPC cost (based on the results of your campaigns so far) and choose a default bid close to that number.
- Find out which keywords work best and increase their bid - Look at your statistical reports and find out which keywords generated the most sales. Increasing the bids for those keywords will improve their ad position and generate more sales.
- Lower bids even further for keywords that received a lot of impressions but did not generate a lot of sales.
At the end of this exercise, you should have a group of keywords with a higher bid than the rest (winning keywords), a group with ‘normal bids’ (potential keywords), and a group with lower bids (candidates for removal).
2. Adjust bids based on location, devices, day and times
While you do the above exercise to lower your bids, you should also review and find out:
- Which devices perform better (mobile, tablets, desktops)?
- Which locations bring in more quality traffic (country, city, area)?
- Which is the best and worst ‘selling day.’
- Which time of the day do you make the most conversions?
Remember that your goal is to lower CPC costs, so any changes you make should be in that direction.
For example, based on the above data, you can increase bids for certain locations where your ads perform better, stop the ads running on particular dates, or increase bids for mobiles since they have a higher ROI than desktops.
The possibilities are endless, and it all depends on your data. Generally, don’t be afraid to make changes, but don’t take too many chances simultaneously. Take it step-by-step and track everything so that you know what works better at the end of the day.
3. Review your keywords and add more long-tail keywords
Keywords have an associated cost; the greater the number of people bidding on a particular keyword, the higher the bid. If you only have high-competition keywords in your campaign, then your CPC will be high, too.
You should revise your keywords and create ad groups with lower-competition keywords. These are usually long-tail keywords; while they have lower search volume, they cost less, and some perform well as well. It sounds tricky, but spending time searching for low-competition keywords can make the difference since you will get conversions at a lower cost.
4. Add more negative keywords
Something that should be part of your weekly routine is to review your ‘search keywords’ and identify negative keywords. Negative keywords are ‘wasting’ your budget on clicks you do not want and making your campaigns less competitive.
If you do not already have a negative keywords list (at the campaign or ad group level), you are almost certain to bid on keywords irrelevant to your business, which is one reason for high CPC costs.
Understand how keyword-matching options make your negative keyword list even more effective.
5. Review your landing pages
One of the factors associated with CPC costs is the relevancy of the landing page. The ad landing page indirectly affects your quality score and costs. Some things to know about AdWords landing pages:
Don’t always redirect users to the home page but rather to a page dedicated to the products or services advertised in the ad.
Make sure that Google can easily understand the topic of the landing page. Include page titles, descriptions, headings, and content that ‘matches’ your keywords and ad message.
Create different landing pages for different products. You don’t have to redirect all AdWords users to the same landing page; instead, create different landing pages for your advertising products or services.
Do your landing page experiments correctly. While it’s good to experiment with different landing pages, calls to action, etc., you will be wasting your time if you do this incorrectly. What is important is to make only one set of changes at a time, not many things together.
For example, if you change your Adwords campaigns (ads, keywords, etc.), don’t change your landing pages simultaneously since you won’t know which generated better or worse results.
Final thoughts
I like it a lot not only because of the benefits it brings to businesses but also because of the nature of the system; a beginner can use it by letting Google deal with the details or a more advanced user who likes to optimize their PPC campaigns and looks at every part in detail.
The five ways outlined above are certainly not the only ones to help you lower your costs. Other ways, like reviewing your ad copy, enabling Google Ads conversion tracking, using ad extensions correctly, and many more, can help you increase your profit margins while increasing sales.
What methods are you using to lower your CPC costs?
