Mastering Google Ads and Facebook Ads is essential for businesses looking to effectively reach and engage their target audiences.
However, running successful advertising campaigns on these platforms can be expensive, especially if your Cost Per Click (CPC) is high. Reducing your cost per click on Google Ads and optimizing your CPC not only maximizes your advertising budget but also improves the overall return on investment (ROI) of your digital marketing efforts.
1. Review your “budget-constrained” campaigns
One way to reduce your costs is by lowering your bids, and this refers to your “budget-limited” campaigns. “Budget-limited” is a campaign status in Google Ads that means your bids are high enough for you to be eligible to participate in a certain number of auctions, but you don’t have enough of a budget to appear in that many auctions.
For campaigns with this status, you could:
Increase the budget
If it’s a high-value campaign and you can afford to increase it, you can increase your budget. This could lead to more conversions, but remember, if your spend increases more than your conversions increase, your CPL won’t change.
Reduce your bids
This will allow you to enter cheaper bids, which will give you cheaper clicks on lower ad positions. You just need to keep an eye on your conversion volume. If your lower bids reduce your CPA by 30%, but also lower your average position and reduce your conversion volume by 50%, it’s not worth it.
Use the “Search lost IS (budget)” column and the “Estimated first-page bid” column
To see how budget-limited a campaign is and how high you need to keep your bid. If any of your higher CPL campaigns are not budget-limited, but are a high-value campaign, you can look to reduce bids/budgets on lower-value campaigns to reduce your total CPL across the account.
2. Increase your Quality Score
A lower bid can lower your cost per click, which in turn lowers your overall CPL. But how can you win the Google Ads auction with a lower bid? With a high Quality Score. The way the Google Ads auction works is that Google rewards quality ads with lower costs per click.
To improve your Quality Score, you need to understand its three components:
Expected Click-Through Rate: Use our tips to improve your CTR, such as using ad extensions, ad customizers, and improving your ad copy, which will increase your expected CTR.
Landing page experience: We’ll talk more about landing pages later, but the main idea here is to make sure they’re trustworthy and useful to people who click on your ad. Follow our tips on how to reduce your CPC with landing page optimization.
Ad Relevance: This means making sure there is close alignment between your keywords, their associated ads, and landing pages.
3. Adjust your account structure
Your account structure refers to how you organize your keywords and ads into ad groups, and then those ad groups into campaigns. A proper account structure is important for reducing CPA in several ways:
- Single-topic ad groups will ensure that your keywords, ads, and landing pages are closely aligned, improving relevance and therefore Quality Score as well.
- Automated bid strategies are set up at the campaign level, so with proper organization, you ensure that Google receives both the correct and consistent data to optimize your bids and keep your costs under control.
- Since budgets are set at the campaign level, you can distribute budgets more easily when your campaigns are organized properly (like following tip #1).
- When your keywords are grouped into thematic ad groups, you can more easily spot CPL patterns and allocate your budget based on how keywords perform in those ad groups.
4. Adjust your Bids
Review your campaigns and make sure you’re not wasting money on campaign settings or targeting. If you’re using manual bids or Enhanced CPC, you can make adjustments based on:
Device: Desktop, mobile, tablet, etc. Demographics: Age, gender, location, etc.
Audience: Detailed demographics, in-market, affinity, custom segments, etc.
Networks: Search, Display or partner network.
Time of day: Depending on your ad schedule. If any time of day, network, location, or device is lagging in conversion rates, exclude those segments or adjust your bids accordingly.
5. Adjust your goals
If you’re using an automated bidding strategy, your ability to adjust is more limited, but you can adjust your targets. For example, if you’re using the Max Conversions bidding strategy, you can set a target CPA (tCPA).
If you know how much a conversion needs to cost to be profitable, setting a target CPA is a great way to control costs.
Just make sure you set a realistic goal. If you set your goal too low, Google might have a hard time finding auctions that meet those conditions, which can result in fewer impressions, which in turn can lead to fewer clicks and eventually fewer conversions, which will increase your CPL.
6. Clean up your keywords
Having an optimal account structure allows you to more easily spot keyword performance patterns. Here are some of the patterns to look out for and what actions you can take to reduce your CPL:
Boost your high-performing keywords: Find keywords with low cost-per-clicks and high conversion rates and allocate more budget to those campaigns.
Keep a list of negative keywords. Use the search terms report and look for keywords that have:
- Many clicks but few/no conversions.
- At least 3 conversions but a CPA well above your target (3-4 times higher).
- A good number of impressions but a low click-through rate.
Pause keywords. You may also want to pause keywords that have CPAs 2x higher than your account average. You could delete these, but it may be better to pause them to preserve historical data.
Make sure your keyword volume is sufficient. Improving the Quality Score of your keywords is fine, but this won’t make a huge difference to your CPL numbers if your high QS keywords have very low volume.
7. Improve your landing pages
If you’re targeting the right audience with super-relevant ads and landing pages, but you’re not seeing conversions, you may need to do some optimization on your landing page. After all, you can have best practices on your landing page that meet the Quality Score requirements—relevant, useful, fast-loading—but there may still be room for improvement. There are several options you can test and optimize, including:
Forms: Number of form fields, placeholder text, form button CTA.
Buttons: Colors, language, number of buttons.
Writing: Emotional focus, text size and colors, testimonials, dynamic content.
Images: Faces with testimonials, screenshots of the platform, positive or negative content.
Additional features: Dynamic content, live chat, video.
8. Clean up conversion tracking
The final strategy to lower your cost per lead in Google Ads is to make sure your conversion tracking is in good shape. This means:
Address issues. Maybe you have it set up, but you’re seeing gaps in your data. Check to see if you’re stuck with any of these issues in conversion tracking.
Set up offline conversion tracking. Syncing your CRM with Google Ads can help you get a more complete view of which keywords and targeting criteria are driving the most profitable conversions. You can also segment and target more granularly. Check out Google’s help page on offline conversion tracking to see what your options are.
Set conversion values regardless. Make sure you set conversion values regardless of whether you’re using a value-based bidding strategy. This will allow Google to collect the data for you if you decide to go that route. Plus, you’ll get a better overview of your account’s performance.
