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When it comes to pay per click advertising, finding different ways to lower your CPC (cost per click) for the keywords you’re bidding on is crucial. If your cost per click is less, then surely your cost per conversion will be lower?

The answer to this is – yes!

So how you can reduce your CPC? In the beginning, simply lowering your bids isn’t likely to do the trick, so what you do to lower your CPC while still saying competitive?

Here are 5 simple ways you can lower your CPC in AdWords.

#1 - Improve Relevancy

Talking about “relevancy” in regards to PPC is like talking saying “content is king” when it comes to SEO – you’re sick of hearing it!

Though this might be the case, the best PPC campaigns are ones that are incredibly granular. This often means having single keyword ad groups (but you’re allowed different match types) that have incredibly relevant ads to target that one specific keyword. These single keyword ad groups then have landing pages that are specifically optimised for that keyword, which improves landing page relevancy.

Now this sounds like a lot of work (it is!) so I’d recommend that you start small and see the amazing results that single keyword ad groups will have for your campaign. Start with your top 5 keywords and go from there.

There’s more about single keyword ad groups and their benefits further down in this post, so keep reading!

#2 – Improve Quality Score

If you’ve followed along and implemented the tip above, then you’ll be glad to know that improving relevancy helps you get a higher quality score.

When you create highly relevant ads, your CTR (click through rate) will go up, and when your CTR goes up, your quality score goes up, and when your quality score goes up, your ad rank goes up and that lower CPC you’ve been dreaming of can now become reality.

#3 – Testing

One of the best things about PPC is that it’s fast. In an industry with a lot of search volume we’re able to see the results of our tweaks very quickly and are then able to decide what to do going forward. This means that it’s incredibly important to be frequently creating new ads to go up against your best ads.

What do I mean by that?

Don’t settle for a CTR of 7%, try to improve it and get 10%! Even if you manage to get 10/10 for quality score, there are always better call to actions to use, so test them all!

#4 – Lower Your Maximum Bid

Lowering your keyword bids is obviously the simplest way to lower your CPC. By lowering your bid, you are giving Google a lower maximum amount that you’re willing to pay for each click.

If you’ve done steps 1-3 and have improved your quality score by improving your ad relevancy and have seen that your ad rank is also going up, but you’re still paying the same cost per click, you might just have to consider gradually lowering your bids.

You might wonder why you’re still paying the same amount even after the improvements you’ve made, and I often wonder this myself. Why do I think it happens? Well, while Google is a free to use search engine, they still have shareholders and have to make money somehow!

So lower your bids (slowly!) and make sure that you keep an eye on what position your ad shows in. You’ll be surprised by how low you’re able to go and not take a hit in ad position.

Sometimes a lower ad position can also be a good thing. I often find that lower ad positions (not too low so they don’t get clicks, though) often have a better conversion rate. My theory on this is that the searcher has taken more time to find your ad, read the ad copy and found that it’s more relevant to what they’re looking for than the results above. They obviously haven’t just blindly clicked the first result they’ve seen.

#5 – Keep on Top of Negative Keywords

We’ve audited and worked on many PPC campaigns that people have set up themselves or have had a PPC agency work on, and one thing we often notice is that the search terms report gets neglected.

The search terms report shows you all of the keywords that have been searched that your ads have shown for. You should regularly go through this and add any keywords that aren’t converting well enough to your negative keyword list.

As well as improving the relevancy of your ad groups and campaigns, this will mean you’ll not have to carry on paying for keywords you don’t want to pay for!

You can access the search terms report by going into ‘Keywords’ and then selecting the ‘Search Terms’ tab.

What do you do to lower your CPC?