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How to Effectively Lower Your CPC on Google Ads
Reading Time: 4 minutes
You’ve got to spend money to make money. If you promote your business through paid search advertising, you know that.
But, you may not have to spend quite as much money. If you can lower your CPC on Google Ads, while maintaining your reach and click-through rate, suddenly this channel becomes a lot more profitable.
This isn’t an impossible thing to do. There are some sure-fire steps you can take to effectively lower your CPC, and we share them below.
1. Increase your Quality Score.
Each ad you set up in Google Ads gets its own Quality Score. Google automatically creates this Quality Score based on the relevance of your ad, the click-through rate, and your landing page experience. The higher your Quality Score, the better your ad placement. In other words, a good QS is essential for a low CPC.
Focus on updating paid ads with a Quality Score of 5 or below. This is the danger zone. Then, move on to improving ads with Quality Scores of 6 to 7. Once you achieve a score of 8 or above, you’re golden.
2. Use long-tail keywords.
It’s easy to get distracted by sky-high volume numbers. Unless you’re running a pure awareness campaign, you don’t need volume. What you need is intent, and specifically purchase intent.
Review your current strategy to zero in on the long-tail keywords that drive conversions and higher CTRs. Add relevant keyword variations with strong purchase intent, even if they have lower volume.
Why? With less volume, there’s less competition, so you’ll enjoy a lower CPC. Good news: Long-tail keywords also tend to have higher Quality Scores.
3. Add negative keywords.
Want to stop paying for keywords that don’t translate to conversions? Add negative keywords to your campaign. These specify to Google which keywords you don’t want your ad to appear for. Stop paying for unprofitable keywords, and you’ll bring your CPC way down.
To find these, review your Google Ads dashboards for keywords with high cost, but little-to-no conversions or relating to irrelevant search terms. Move these to your negative keywords list.
4. Go for second place.
One quick way to lower your bids? Stop bidding for the most expensive spot. Test targeting for the second position. Your ad will still appear above the organic results, but you’ll pay significantly less.
Before you do this for all your ads, test it first with lower-priority keywords. If some of your ads perform extremely well in the top position, moving them to second place may not be worth the lower CPC.
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5. Revamp your landing pages.
Review the landing pages you’re currently using for your ads. How well do they match the audience, purchase intent, and keyword you’ve targeted in your ad?
Chances are, you can create new landing pages and optimize your existing ones for better results. By improving your landing pages and making them more relevant, you’ll improve your Quality Score, resulting in lower CPC.
Landing page improvements can spell big results. For one of our clients in the real estate industry, just a few simple but strategic design tweaks reduced their CPL by 50%.
6. Improve your ad relevance.
In the keywords tab, Google displays the ad relevance for each of your ads. Hover over to find any low performers. They’re easy to spot because they’ll have a discouraging “Below Average” status.
Make your ads more relevant by including the relevant keywords from that ad group in the ad copy itself (ideally, both the headline and the description). Update the landing page to match too.
Remember, ad copy isn’t just a place to shove in your target keywords. Speak to your audience like they’re human. For one client, our copy adjustments led to a 10% boost in click-through rate. Read the case study.
7. Test different match types.
While not necessarily true for all campaigns and industries, different match types can have varying CPCs. Typically, Exact Match is more expensive than Broad Match, but when you bid for long-tail keywords with low competition, you can significantly reduce your CPC.
Start experimenting by creating several ad groups with the same keyword, but with one ad group per match type. A safe way to test this is to pause your campaign, change the match type, and see what it does for your bid estimates. If it’s lower than before, press go.
8. Adjust everything.
To take your CPC even lower, you’ve got to get into the nitty-gritty of optimizing your paid search campaigns based on anything and everything: devices, location, and your best (or worst) days and times.
For example, mobile and desktop users have different needs, and they’ll require different landing page experiences. A mobile user will want a fast-loading page, with minimal elements, while a desktop user can wait for your marketing video to load. When we separated mobile vs. desktop targeting for one of our Google Shopping clients, this single change lowered their mobile CPC by 60% and their overall CPC by 40%.
Lower Your Google Ads CPC, Boost Your ROI
As you can see, your CPC is affected by a number of things: the keywords, ad copy, landing page, and much more. The secret to an ultra-low CPC is fine-tuning each one of those things, monitoring the results, and iterating from there.
It’s a lot, but the results make it well worth it. Plus, with lower CPCs, you can shift more of your budget to higher-performing campaigns to drive even larger wins.
Ready to lower your CPC? Learn more about our paid search services.
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