One of the key ways to evaluate your Google Ads success is by your Cost-Per-Click (or CPC).

We like how Wordstream defines it:

“A “click” on one of your PPC text ads represents a visit or an interaction with your company’s product or service offering. Every click in a PPC campaign represents attention from a person who is searching for something that you offer. This attention is what you’re buying, as an advertiser, so it’s important to note two factors:

What type of attention you’re going after, and

How much you’re paying for it.”

While you obviously want a CPC of some kind, because you want people clicking on your ad, it’s not good for your CPC to be too high. Essentially you want your ads to be getting the right engagement. A good CPC on your Google Ads campaigns means a good ROI for your business. [Google Ads Guide]

How to Lower Your Cost-Per-Click 

Your cost per click can vary depending on a multitude of factors, including:

Keyword Relevance

Obviously, your keywords should be specific (and relevant) to your business in general. But something you may not think about is how your keywords are grouped. If you offer a variety of products, like lawnmowers and grills, you would not want to put “grill” and “lawnmower” in the same campaign. This overlap keeps your quality score too low, and your CPC too high.

Bid Adjustment

Bid adjustments can ensure you’re spending your Google Ads money efficiently. When analyzing your campaigns, notice which demographics, times, devices and days have the best Clickthrough Rate (CTR). Do the highest results line up with your target market and your overall goals? If so, you can continue to invest more into that campaign. If there’s a disconnect, you’d want to decrease your bid or pause the campaign for now.

Bidding Strategies

There are two ways you can set up bidding for CPC: Manual or Enhanced. With Enhanced Bidding, Google Ads bids (for you) on keywords most likely to get a conversion. With Manual Bidding, you control what you spend, or if you increase your bid.

Your Industry

The more competitive your industry is, the more competitive the bidding is. A competitor increasing their bid means everyone else will, too. Understanding competition, search traffic, and keyword success in your industry can help you discern which keywords are “worth it”, and which aren’t.

The Right Negative Keywords

Negative keywords are a great tool to make sure you’re optimizing your CPC. Negative keywords help exclude irrelevant queries to keep that quality score high. For example, if your site is focused selling pizza stones to help people bake the perfect pie, listing “delivery” as a negative keyword will keep people searching for pizza delivery from seeing (and clicking on) your ad.

Landing Page

Another piece of the puzzle is your landing page.  You want to make sure that people clicking your Ad are ending up where they want to be. Otherwise, the quality score goes down, and the cost goes up. Here are some questions to ask yourself about your landing page:

• Are load times fast?
• Is it easy to navigate across devices?
• Can people find the product or service they’re looking for?
• Can people quickly and easily make a purchase after they click on your ad?
• Is your landing page relevant to:
  • the search query?
  • keywords in the ad group?
  • To the ad copy?

You should be answering “yes” to all these questions in order for your CPC to be a good investment. If you have “nos”, it’s probably too high.

As you can see, lowering your bids on all your keywords would not be the right way to lower your CPC. The key is to know which keywords to invest in, and which to skip, to make sure your Google Ads cost-per-click is giving you high-quality results, and a good return on your investment.

[More Google Ads Resources] [Other Digital Advertising Resources]