Running a successful Google Ads campaign requires balancing cost and performance. While lowering cost-per-click (CPC) can help maximize your budget, doing so without losing conversions can be challenging. If CPCs drop too much, ad visibility and traffic may suffer. On the other hand, keeping bids too high may lead to unnecessary ad spend.
The key is to find a sweet spot where your ads remain competitive, your Quality Score stays high, and you continue attracting potential customers without overpaying for clicks. By refining your keyword strategy, improving ad relevance, and refining your ad schedule, you can effectively lower CPCs while maintaining strong conversion rates.
Improve Your Quality Score & Ad Rank
Google Ads assigns something called a Quality Score to every ad in your account. The Quality Score is based on a combination of ad relevance, expected click-through-rate (CTR), and landing page experience. Google rewards the ads with higher Quality Scores with lower CPCs. Your Quality Score multiplied by your bid gives you your Ad Rank, which determines where on the SERP your ad will appear.
To increase your Quality Score, try the following:
- Use a lot of keywords in your ad copy
- Ensure the messaging on your landing page matches that of your ad copy
- Use extensions (images, videos, sitelinks, callouts, phone numbers, etc) to increase CTRs
- Test different CTAs in your ad copy. Maybe you’ll find that one call-to-action converts higher than another
Optimize Your Search Keywords
If your CPCs have been drifting upward, it is time to reevaluate your search keyword list and identify the underperformers. Pause any keywords that are high-cost and low-return. Make sure all your keywords are at least phrase-match, if not exact-match.
Next, go to your Search Terms report and analyze what terms your ads are actually appearing for. Do all the terms make sense? Mark any irrelevant terms as negative keywords so that you don’t waste impressions (or clicks!) on them anymore.
Turn Off Ads During Expensive Times
Once you have a few weeks of data, you can usually see temporal patterns in your ad’s performance. Maybe you get a ton of clicks on Monday morning, but the most conversions come on Thursday afternoons. Maybe Sundays have a rock-bottom CPC and you want to increase ad presence on that day in order to take more search impression share. Or, maybe your business is on a tight budget and you simply can’t afford to advertise on the highest-cost weekday.
Whatever the reason, it is critical that every now and then you evaluate your daily (or even hourly) advertising costs, and determine whether those costs are worth it for your business goals. Turning off the most expensive advertising times will help reduce your CPC by telling Google to focus only on those days and hours that yield a profit for you.