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The success of your PPC campaigns does not hinge on a single factor or metric. Instead, there are many moving parts, activities and metrics that all contribute to your campaigns’ success.
This long list includes planning your budget and optimizing your spending, targeting the ideal audience, developing and testing new ad experiences, researching keywords and much more.
While all of this is useful, cost and CTR (clickthrough rate) are two of the most common ways PPC marketers benchmark their performance and success.
A high clickthrough rate typically results in more conversions. When this is balanced with low costs and limited ad spending, it’s a recipe for a successful PPC strategy.
Cost always need to be addressed. If you aren’t paying close attention to your money going out versus what’s coming in, then you could be spending more than you’re actually earning.
Average CPC (cost per click) is useful in tracking expenses and keeping them low. This is a measure of how much you spend on average for each click.
Lowering your CPCs, while still maintaining a high CTR, will help you run a more efficient and profitable campaign.
In this discussion, we’ll look at why a Google Ads automation tool is the key to unlocking higher performance, with lower cost and less chaos.
CPC is a very important metric because it determines your campaigns’ financial success and ultimately dictates how much you’ll spend on Google Ads.
Essentially, your goal is to maximize your return on investment, or ROI. This is a measure of spending less and gaining more.
When you’re under or overpaying for clicks, it will be reflected in your ROI.
Some advertisers fall into the misconception that expensive keywords with high CPC amounts are acceptable, as long as you’re making money from your campaigns.
This is very short-sighted and will not always lead to good results.
The problem is that, while these high-cost keywords may be getting you results and even creating a positive ROI, it doesn’t mean that you’re getting quality returns.
Your cost and performance metrics are always fluctuating. They are in a constant state of change.
Suppose you are overpaying for keywords that are producing only slightly positive returns. When performance changes and those returns dip into the negative, you’ll end up wasting more ad spend then you earned.
Ideally, you want to keep your CPC values low, while still driving quality, relevant traffic to your site.
Are you worried that you’re overpaying for clicks? There are several strategies that you can implement to help lower your costs and achieve a more optimal ROI.
Did you know that Google has an automated system for offering pricing discounts to PPC marketers? Google knows that PPC campaigns with high Quality Scores are offering exceptional ad experiences to search users.
As a reward for these well-managed PPC campaigns, Google gives the account owners a decrease in CPC values.
If you have a Quality Score higher than 6, you could be experiencing 16-50% lower CPC values. Meanwhile, low-quality campaigns with ratings 4 and lower see an increase in click costs, as high as 400%!
This is a dramatic difference that goes to show just how vital Quality Scores are to keeping costs manageable.
There are a few best practices for improving your Quality Score ratings that you can easily implement:
Remember, low Quality Scores can be increasing your cost, so start by improving the least-quality campaigns first.
Since CPC is directly associated with the keywords you’re targeting, it’s an essential stop on your journey to lowering your costs.
Researching and planning new PPC keywords is an ongoing task that all PPC marketers need to engage in regularly.
It’s important to note that your keywords are always changing and performance ebbs and flows. This means that your best keyword performers this month may not be so valuable in the future.
Ideally, you want to have a steady list of new, relevant and valuable keywords to distribute your budget across. This will vastly improve the overall stability of your campaigns.
When keywords begin underperforming, you should have plenty of new keyword opportunities ready to replace them. You can find new and similar keywords from the tool PPCexpo Keyword Planner.
You can access keyword planner from here
Keyword research is not only about exploring new possible search opportunities; it’s also about avoiding wrong keywords. These keywords cause your CPC to spike and often lead to irrelevant traffic that is unlikely to convert.
For example, if you’re an electronics store that doesn’t carry any Apple products, you don’t want your ads to appear for Google users searching specifically for the Apple brand.
These individuals will leave your site without converting because you don’t actually carry what they are looking for.
This is just one of the many reasons you may need to exclude a keyword from your targeting.
By regularly refining your keyword lists, you can ensure that you only target the ones that are relevant and valuable to your business. This leads to two big positives:
You can change your keyword targets, as well as your costs, by altering how closely you want them to match user search queries. This is controlled through match types.
When you change your match types, it can sometimes dramatically affect your CPC values, depending on the keyword and new match type selection.
To get a rough idea of how different match types will impact your bids and CPC amounts, pause your campaign temporarily and then change the match type.
While paused, this won’t affect any of your costs, but you’ll be able to see bid estimates. These estimates will give you an idea of what sort of CPCs you can expect.
If you don’t want to have any interruption to your campaign, you can copy it and pause the duplicate instead.
As you compare these bid estimates to what your live campaign is currently experiencing, you’ll begin to better understand how the different match type options impact your costs.
Remember to revisit these bid estimates throughout the year. There may be seasonal trends that affect which match types are best.
We know that Quality Scores are essential when attempting to correct high CPC amounts. And, we know that ad relevance and clickthrough rates are key factors that Google uses when assigning these scores.
This means that a lot of the weight of your Quality Scores ultimately rests on your ads. They need to be on-topic and quality to guarantee lots of relevant clicks that boost your ratings.
When making these adjustments to your ads, it’s not only about lowering your costs. Ads with higher Quality Scores also receive better ad ranks, thereby making your paid search messages more visible to audiences.
If you’re able to develop quality ads, you’ll continuously be able to obtain better ad ranks and at lower costs.
This is not an easy task and there is no guaranteed recipe for success.
Your best option is to rigorously A/B test your ad messages. This process involves creating two near-identical ad messages, with only one difference between the two.
For instance, you may run two identical ads, but each one uses a different call-to-action or headline. When you run these ads side by side, you can test which option performs the strongest.
Overtime, A/B tests can help you develop stronger, higher-quality ad experiences, while also learning what audiences find most relevant.
If you’re having a hard time obtaining that vital element of relevance with your ads, it may not be a problem with your copy.
It may be a problem with your ad groups.
Ad groups are used to keep your campaigns organized by collecting related keywords together. However, when these groupings are too broad, it can create problems with relevance.
Keywords in the same ad group will commonly share ad copy and landing pages. So, if you have a rogue keyword that is not on-topic, it won’t make sense with your ad message or the resulting landing page.
This is a recipe for a low-quality and irrelevant ad experience, which is exactly what you want to avoid!
You should get in the habit of routinely going through your ad groups and checking that each keyword is on-theme.
If you come across an ad group with many keywords, consider ways to separate it into two or more smaller, tighter groupings.
There’s a common rule of thumb in PPC marketing that says the longer a keyword phrase is, the lower its CPC.
That’s because longer keywords are more specific and this higher level of specificity means less search volume. Lower search volumes translate to less competition and then fewer bids.
For instance, a keyword like “women’s skirts” is highly competitive and would require a much higher CPC bid than a search phrase like “women’s blue cotton skirt for summer.”
Despite having lower search volumes, specific keyword phrases are still very valuable. Some PPC marketers only focus on long-tail keywords.
Even though you may generate fewer impressions, when someone does search for this specific phrase, there’s a higher likelihood that they will click on your ad. Conversion rates are also higher for very niche keywords.
Specific searches signal a customer that knows exactly what they want. If you can fill that request, it’s an easy conversion.
Plus, you won’t have to bid so aggressively!
Google Ads gives its users a variety of bidding strategies. There are even automated options that adjust bids for you, like enhanced CPC, maximize clicks, maximize conversions and others.
However, a manual bidding strategy really offers the highest level of control over your campaigns and, in particular, your CPC numbers.
If you have the time to manage your bids manually, this is really the best option. You can set bids as high as you feel comfortable.
Google will provide you with a recommended bid amount. Bidding below this amount is not ideal as it is doubtful that your ads will show. Many PPC marketers consider Google’s recommendation as the minimum possible bid.
If you’re torn between automated and manual bidding, enhanced CPC (ECPC) is an interesting option because it is only semi-automated.
With the ECPC bidding strategy, you set a maximum bid amount that you’re willing to pay. Then, Google uses its automated algorithm to optimize your ads’ performance with this bid ceiling in mind.
When managing bids, there are three things to keep in mind:
Remarketing is about generating return visits from customers or prospects that have already browsed your site.
In the Digital Age, it’s common for a prospective customer to interact multiple times with your website before converting.
With remarketing, you’re enticing those second, third and even fourth visits that may be necessary before a customer is ready to convert.
It’s about bringing interested parties back to your site.
This has a very positive effect on clickthrough rates, CPC values and your conversion numbers. After all, these are people that have interacted with your site before. They’ve browsed your products, shopped around and now it’s just a matter of closing the deal.
Thus, they don’t need much convincing to engage with your brand and its messages again.
You can refine your targeting and bidding through a number of different parameters, such as by location, by device type, day of the week or by the time of day.
This is a great strategy for lowering your CPC because it will remove any underperforming targets. For instance, there may be specific locations or time slots where costs are higher but results are lower or stay the same.
By ensuring that you only target the times, devices and locations with the most to offer, you can keep your costs as low as possible.
Before you can begin to adjust bids based on these parameters, you need to analyze your campaigns and find out the following:
PPCexpo Reporting tool is a best choice to know about all the in and out of your Google ads account performance. It is a really a great reporting with elegant visualization.
You can access PPC reports from here.
In the pursuit of optimal PPC performance – that means maximizing the number of people who see, click and then convert because of your ad – you must leave no stone unturned.
Even the simple act of targeting one hour in the day over another can make a notable impact on your performance!
Most PPC marketers automatically strive for the number one ad rank because it is the first thing search users see on the page.
However, there are cases where the difference in performance between ad rank 1 and ad rank 2 is so slight that it becomes negligible.
In other words, you may be paying a premium for the top ad spot, even though it doesn’t actually improve clicks or conversions.
Again, this is where testing is helpful. By placing the same ad at different ranks, you can compare and contrast each position’s impact on performance.
Is it worth it to go all-in for the top ad spot? Or, do the cheaper CPC amounts for ad rank 2 offset the slight loss of performance from this lower position?
After a search user clicks your ad, they are brought to a landing page on your website. This is ultimately the last hurdle before you receive that all-important conversion.
Landing pages are also a factor in Quality Score ratings.
So, what does an optimized landing page experience actually look like? There are a number of qualities that you need to consider:
Similar to your ad copy, you can also use the A/B testing method when optimizing your landing pages. The more you test different experiences, the deeper you’ll grow your understanding of what resonates most with your target audience.
Optimization is not easy.
Think about all of the steps we just listed in the previous section. Then, think about how much time it would take to complete every task on that list for every campaign in your account.
If you have a large Google Ads account with hundreds of campaigns, this can cost you more time than you have. The larger the account, the more possible combinations there are to explore, which increases the complexity of the process exponentially.
The solution is to automate this tedious and time-consuming process with third-party tools. PPC Signal is a great option that helps you minimize your workload, while still optimizing your results and performance, including CPC.
You can access PPC Signal from here.
PPC Signal significantly improves the optimization process by automatically detecting any trends, shifts, outliers or other changes in your data. Then, it presents each observed change as a signal.
Each signal acts as a small alarm bell that alerts you of notable fluctuations in your campaigns that may require closer attention.
This saves you tremendous time compared to manually monitoring your campaign data and analyzing these changes by yourself.
In terms of improving your CPC values, you can quickly filter the list of alerts provided by PPC Signal by selecting “Average CPC” from the left menu. This will display only the alerts that relate to improving your CPC.
Let’s take a look at one of these signals to better understand how this Google Ads automation tool works.
The first signal in the list (top, left tile) shows that your average CPC has been moving upwards rather dramatically. It went from $0.12 per click to $1.40!
That’s a 1,066.7% increase! Imagine if you didn’t have a Google Ads automation tool like PPC Signal to catch this problem. You could be wasting hundreds of ad dollars.
When you tap or click on any signal, you’re given the option to explore it further.
Clicking “Explore” will expand the signal and display a more extensive chart so you can see your average CPC trend line closer.
From this view, you can see that the real dramatic turn happened around January 23rd. Since then, CPC values have been skyrocketing.
You can add additional metrics to this chart with just the click of a button. This allows you to see how a dramatic change in CPC correlates to your other metrics.
Is there something going on in your other data that is creating the high spike? Or, is the sudden high cost of CPC causing performance issues elsewhere?
Another notable feature of PPC Signal is the ability to switch back and forth between this chart and a tabular view of the data.
It’s very easy for wasted spending and underperforming keywords to cause your account to spiral negatively.
If you’re proactively using PPC Signal, you’d never have such a dramatic spike in your CPC values because the system would alert you on the third day when it began to identify the trend.
This is a great early warning system that helps you mitigate large risks and capitalize on emerging opportunities. Remember, not every alert to your account is a negative change. PPC Signal will also discover trends that can positively impact your performance!
With PPC Signal, you have an always-alert alarm system that analyzes and monitors everything for you. No opportunities or risks will go undetected!
When you know ahead of time that CPC will be higher or lower than the norm, you have a chance to act well ahead of this event.
For instance, if you detect that a campaign’s CPC is starting to rise and cost you more and more each day, then you quickly take actions and:
If you start adopting this practice of taking smart actions in response to PPC Signal’s alerts, you’ll not only eliminate any risk of costly spikes in your clicks, but you’ll also grow the success of your account at an exponential rate.
To wrap up, let’s recap the benefits of using PPC Signal. The following are all the reasons why you need this Google Ads automation tool.
When you keep your click cost low, it ensures that you have more room for profits. Half of the ROI equation is your investment. If you can minimize that, while still increasing your returns, it’s a winning strategy.
It sounds easy in theory, but complexity can make it an impossible nightmare, especially when working with a large Google Ads account.
That’s why Google Ads automation tools, like PPC Signal, are helpful and often vital solutions to the problem.
With AI and machine learning doing the heavy lifting, you can save hours every week. This is all time that can be spent improving your strategies and achieving even better results.
Get rid of the guesswork and enjoy better results at lower click costs.
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