Marketing Strategy: How to Reduce Your Cost Per Click in Google Ads

With all of the changes to Google / the crazy internet advertising market over the last year, marketing is starting to come back down to reality. Creating a new marketing strategy to help capture this new uptick is important. There are many metrics you can use to see how impactful you have been, cost per click or CPC is a great place to show progress in.

LOWER GOOGLE SEARCH CPC

Google search is where most companies put most of their money and have the largest online presence besides social media. So having the right marketing strategy to reduce your cost per click here will help you increase your budget and keep its pace throughout the month.

KEYWORD SELECTION IS KEY

In Google Ads, you can do keyword research to estimate the number of searches a month and what the average price of a keyword or the search term is. This is usually the first step in creating a marketing strategy. You want to find a mix of keywords that attract a lot of searches as well as being a fair-priced keyword.

IMPROVE YOUR QUALITY SCORE

We recently went over quality score in a blog post, and most people do not understand the value behind it. Your max CPC multiplied by your quality score gives you your ad rank. So let us compare two scenarios. First, you have a max CPC of $2.00 but have a quality score of 9. If you add that together your ad rank would be an 18. The second ad has a CPC of $6.00 with a quality score of 3. This will give you the same ad rank as the first one. The reason this is important is that having high-quality scores gives small budgets and small CPC bids the advantage over lower quality scores.

To improve your quality score you should be reviewing your ads and landing pages to make sure they are as relevant as possible to the core keywords you are targeting. By doing this you can have lower CPCs than your competitors.

SEARCH PARTNER NETWORK TESTS

The last tip we have to lower CPC in Google Search is to try out the Search Partner Network. This network allows you to show on additional sites with online search features that fall under the Google umbrella. In the past, we have seen that clicks in Google’s Search Partners are cheaper and are also less competitive. If you go into your campaign settings and look under Networks you can check the box that allows you to include search partners. It is a great test to see if you can get some more bang for your buck compared to the typical Google SERP.

LOWERING GOOGLE DISPLAY ADS COST PER CLICK

Google Display is vastly different from Google Search. When it comes to decreasing CPC in Google Display, you typically aren’t focusing on this. The reason being is that clicks are dirt cheap compared to Google Search. However, if you want to extend your budget further by dropping your CPC here are a couple of tips.

EXCLUSIONS

In Google Display, once your campaign is set up, you are automatically showing up everywhere on the Google Display Network, which isn’t ideal. You will want to filter out areas of the internet so that way you get quality leads. You can exclude things like location, topics, audiences, and placements which means specific websites or apps. By doing this you will decrease your wasted spending.

DOUBLE CHECK YOUR BIDS

Knowing what your max bid is in your display campaigns is important. There are several factors to how much your cost per click comes out. With manual bidding, you can decrease your max bid to the desired amount you want. If you use an automated bidding strategy and are using the goal max or target strategy you can play with max CPC otherwise you won’t have control over your bids.

LOWERING GOOGLE SHOPPING ADS COST PER CLICK

The last section we will go over is Google Shopping. This infrastructure is vastly different from Google Search and Display. To drop your CPC down in shopping you will need to take your time, it is actually similar to Google Search and Display.

MAKE YOUR NEGATIVE KEYWORD LIST & DON’T FORGET COMPETITORS

In Google Shopping you cannot pick specific keywords, so what makes a shopping campaign strong is the negative keyword list. You have to acknowledge the competition keywords typically have a higher CPC to try and prevent other companies from bidding on their brand or name. If you have big competitors that have large pockets it can be smart to put them on the negative list, or if you feel like their products will affect search results and increase your CPC make sure to add them to your negative list as well. Adding these keywords to your negative list allows you to reduce your CPC as well as compete with more generic keywords on an even playing field.

CREATE A FUNNEL STRUCTURE

Creating a funnel structure for your Google Shopping campaigns will help you divide and conquer. Most people will split things into three sections: High Priority, Medium Priority, and Low Priority. Each one has a specific intention and helps you to maximize your CPC.

• High Priority: This section typically has lower CPC bids and consists of generic search terms.

• Medium Priority: This section typically has fairly average CPC bids and consists of branded search terms and product types.

• Low Priority: This section typically has high CPC bids and consists of brand and product-specific search terms. They will be high CPC bids because you are protecting your brand name and your specific products from the competition, it will also be search terms that have high intent behind them.

By having this structure you will be able to avoid high-risk CPC that might fall through the cracks and let you optimize your bids more efficiently.

FOLLOWING THE MARKETING STRATEGY

If you follow these tips you will be able to decrease your CPCs in your Google Ads account. Keep in mind that it is a process that takes some time especially since negative keyword lists take a big role in Google Display and Shopping Campaigns. With Q4 coming fast it will be smart to take your CPC into account because depending on your industry they can drastically change.