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So you’ve gotten your Pay Per Click campaigns off the ground and running pretty smoothly. But as with most things, especially things that you are investing money into, there is always room for improvement. One particular metric where improvement translates directly into saved dollars is your Cost Per Click. In this article I’ll expand on 4 ways to get that number on a downward trend.
Improving your Quality Score
The first way to get you cost-per-click to start decreasing is to continuously improve your Quality Score. The Quality Score is a multiplier that Google uses in the ad bid process. Some of the factors that affect a Quality Score is ad relevance, click through rate, and historical account data. The maximum bid of an ad is multiplied by the ads Quality Score. Raising your Quality Score will enable you to win impressions with a lower maximum bid. This also can help you stretch your budget and increase impressions. These extra clicks also increase your Quality Score, helping to lower cost-per-click.
A/B Testing Ads
The second way to lower cost-per-click is through A/B testing ads. Even if you have an ad that is performing extremely well, you should always have a competing ad to test it against. Don’t become content with a click-through rate that is higher than average. You should always be working to improve it. Having ads with high click-through rates will allow Google to identify that your ad is relevant to what is being searched. This in turn will help raise your quality score, ultimately lowering your cost-per-click.
Negative Keyword List
The third way to lower cost-per-click is to create a negative keyword list. Negative keywords are keywords you do not want to advertise on. For example, someone selling “Halloween Masks” would not want to have an ad display for someone searching “Scuba Masks.” Not only are your impressions wasted on someone who is not interested in your ad, the worst part is they could click on it and bounce right back out. By not having a negative keyword list established, you risk users wasting your budget by clicking your ads which in turn can lower your conversion rate and increase your bounce rate. Both of these tell Google that your ad is not relevant, which can hurt your quality score. The negative keywords list also needs to be proactively maintained. Create a negative keyword list within Google Adwords and it will ultimately lower your cost-per-click.
Keeping it Relevant
The fourth way to lower your cost-per-click is by being as relevant as possible and create narrowly themed ad groups. By creating very specificly targeted keywords, your ads will become relative in Google’s eyes. By targeting one specific keyword per ad group, you will see the best results in your ads by hitting their target market. Even though you are only targeting one keyword, you are still allowed different match types. To see the best success, you should also develop custom landing pages to the narrow ad groups. This will not only increase your click through rate, but also your conversions and lower your bounce rate.
So there you have it. Even if your PPC campaigns are high-performers, there is always room for improvement, especially when saving a little cash is involved. When make sure you are constantly building up your quality score with ads that are always competing against each other on the most relevant keywords, you will surely see your cost-per-click go down.
– Jacob Sprague, Marketing Advisor
