How to Decrease CPC in Google Ads: The 6 Best Ways

How to Decrease CPC in Google Ads: The 6 Best Ways

A high cost-per-click (CPC) will drain your Google Ads budget. But there are proven ways to decrease CPC.

Lowering your bid is one way, but real gains require a competitive strategy that respects your budget and looks at 

• Ad relevance
• Quality Score
• Keywords
• Ad copy
• Your landing pages

Lower cost-per-click, typically lower cost per conversion (yippee!).

By the end, youll know how to improve ad quality so you 

• Lower your CPC
• Stay competitive
• Lower your CPA

We like to gamify Google Ads (formerly Google AdWords) to make decreasing CPC costs fun.

You game?

Let’s go!

CPC is the amount you pay each time a user clicks on your ad. It directly impacts your advertising costs and ultimately affects your return on investment (ROI).

Working to decrease your CPC stretches your ad dollars further. A lower CPC means more clicks and potential conversions for the same Google Ads budget. 

The potential profit from specific keywords correlates with the average CPC of those keywords.

If your industry stands to make $5,000 from a keyword, don't expect your CPC to drop to $1. 

That simply won't happen. 

With a $1 bid for a keyword that's so profitable, you won't even be on the first page of the Google search engine results page (SERP). 

But that doesn't mean you can't have a lower CPC than your competitors, rank higher than they do, or laugh harder on your way to the bank.

This is possible for one reason: your ad rank is a combination of your bid + your Quality Score.

When your Quality Score is excellent, you can get away with lower bids than your competitors while also ranking higher than them. 😉

So, your CPCs are skyrocketing.  

In some industries, this is unavoidable.

Legal, tech, and insurance markets all hedge on the higher side of CPC. (It’s good to keep your industry and your amount of competition in mind when assessing your CPCs. Less competition means lower CPC opportunities.)

But there’s a light at the end of the tunnel, even for historically expensive and competitive industries. Your CPC can be lower. For example, well-written ad copy can significantly increase click-through rates and maximize the effectiveness of paid search ads.

Let’s look at six incredible (and simple) ways to decrease CPC costs in your Google Ads campaigns.

You must be tired of hearing this one, right? Well, you shouldn't be. 

The best PPC campaigns are highly granular, meaning they have only one keyword per ad group. 

Yes, one. 

(But you still have different match types of that one keyword in that one ad group.)

Your single-keyword ad groups (SKAGs) should have highly relevant ad copy for each keyword that points to specific landing pages.

The message on the ad must match the message on the landing page.

You might be thinking, "Wait a minute! That sounds like a lot of work!"

Yep, it sure is. Start small and see the results for yourself. Take your most popular keyword and follow that recipe. If it works, then go ahead and duplicate for other keywords.

If you're having trouble thinking of keywords that are most relevant to your business and that's causing an added relevancy problem, take a look at the Google Ads Keyword Planner to get suggestions around keywords that are already close to relevant. You'd be surprised what you find.

Bonus tip: Make sure the text on your landing page is "highlightable" so Google's crawlers can read it and determine the relevancy of your keywords, ads, and landing page.

We can't forget Quality Score, especially not after we just sang its praises. 

If you've followed and implemented your SKthen you'll be happy to know that a higher Quality Score is a (fortunate) side effect of better relevancy.

When you start creating highly targeted ads for your one keyword, the click-through rate (CTR) will ultimately go up because your ad better reflects the searches that triggered it to show up.

 When CTR goes up, Quality Score does, too. A higher CTR benefits your “expected CTR” (one of three Quality Score ranking components).

On top of that, improving your ad-to-keyword match improves your “ad relevancy” ranking (another of the three Quality Score ranking components).

Even better, improving your landing page-to-keyword match and landing page functionality will improve your “landing page experience” ranking (the last of three Quality Score ranking components).

 Because of all this, your ad rank goes up, and your CPC can go down.

Great. So what else? 

One of the things that I love about digital marketing is the speed. 

We get to see the results of our work very quickly, so we can pivot in a new direction if that’s what the data shows..

If you take one thing with you, it’s this:

Create different ads frequently and test them against your winning search ads. 

What do I mean by that? Don't settle for a CTR of 6% with one winning ad—try to improve it.

Heck, even if your Quality Score is 10/10, there are still better words to discover, better calls-to-actions to try, and better offers to push. 

Test. them. all.

Use keyword variations to find hidden gems that drive better results for your Google Ads search campaigns.

Start with already successful keywords and use keyword tools to find similar words or phrases worth testing. From this, adjust ad copy or create whole new ads.

Long-tail keywords are incredibly effective because they're precise and are usually less competitive, which means higher ad relevance and lower CPC.

Review your keyword performance regularly and adjust your strategy. Even if your campaigns are already performing well, refining your keywords and testing new variations can result in better, more cost-effective ads.

4. Lower your bids

So you're seeing that your Quality Scores are going up, and your ad rank is, too. 

Here's the caveat: sometimes, when your quality pushes your rank up, Google decides to make you pay the same CPC or higher. It happens.

Why is that? Well, let's just say that I don't completely trust the automated system that is supposed to only charge you one cent more than the ad below you (given that all metrics are the same between you two).

And if your rank came up a lot because of your higher quality, to the point where you're now competing with the biggest contenders, their Quality Score is also probably pretty high.

This means that sometimes the only thing standing between you two and that number one spot is still… your bidding power.

So if you've completed steps 1–3 and your CPC still isn't where you want it to be, you can then start decreasing your CPC bids in small increments.

If you use automated bidding strategies or smart bidding (that might increase CPC costs without a max CPC limit), you won't be able to control your bids directly like you can with manual bidding. Bid adjustments will take your bids down a notch.

When you do so, keep an eye on your Search Impression Share (Search IS) and Search Top Impression Share (Search Top IS) to ensure that they don't fall dramatically

Most importantly, monitor your conversion rates and return on investment (ROI) while lowering bids.

You'd be surprised at how far down your CPC can go while keeping everything else the same.

Bonus tip: One thing you don't want to sacrifice with decreased CPCs is volume. Why save 30% on CPCs if your volume drops 50%?

Don’t neglect the search terms report. When you look at this report, you can see all the search queries triggering your keywords and ads.

Google Ad Pros say that continuously adding negative keyword lists improves the system and the overall health of your account.

It also narrows in further on the relevancy of your ad campaigns and ad groups, taking you back to tip number one. 👆

On top of that, you'll stop paying for keywords you don't want to pay for.

You'd be surprised how expensive clicks from some of these irrelevant search terms can be. You'd be equally surprised how much search volume those irrelevancies can get. 

That's because the irrelevant keyword variations are usually the furthest away from (AKA least relevant to) the original keyword. If you're using broad-match keywords, you'll have this problem a lot. 

In that case, try switching to phrase match or exact match to clean up your search terms. 

If you're using primary keywords and long-tail keywords in phrase match and exact match types, you might have this problem less often, but you'll still need to comb your search terms since irrelevant variants of your keywords will still pop up.

Heads up: Competition keywords (containing your competitors' names) can also dominate your search terms when you don't intend for them to, and those are very pricey.

Any experienced marketer will know that there’s more to bidding than just keywords. For example, ad scheduling helps optimize ad delivery and reduce costs by identifying peak engagement times, which can lower CPC and improve campaign performance.

You can consider other areas for bid adjustments that can help decrease your CPCs.

Try asking these questions:

• Location: Which areas in my location targeting bring about the most conversions with a relatively good CPA? Which locations bring about lousy performance?
• Device: Which device (computer, tablet, mobile, TV screens) brings out good and bad results?
• Ad Schedule: Which time of the day or day of the week converts higher?

By asking these questions, you’ll find that CPCs can be decreased or increased in areas of low and high performance.

Increase bids during high performance more visible. More visibility hopefully increases conversion rates. Meanwhile, you’ll reduce the CPC in areas that are ​​failing, which should bring down your average overall CPC.

Pro tip: Desktop clicks are way more expensive. And depending on the industry, they may be way less useful. B2B and SaaS businesses sometimes benefit more from desktop clicks, but in eCommerce, it’s often more common for people to shop and buy on their phones. So only pay high for those pricey desktop clicks if they’re the holy grail of your conversion volume.

Whittling down your audience to eliminate wasted ad spend and clicks decreases CPC more than anything else.

When you understand your audience, your ads speak directly to your ideal customer/client. When that happens, you’ll see higher click-through rates without higher Google Ad costs.

Use your Quality Score and the SKAGs system to improve your ad rank without cranking your bids up to the ceiling.

CPC changes because of a bunch of factors.

Quality Score is high on that list. 

Ad relevance, landing page experience, and expected click-through rate affect QS. A good Quality Score means higher placement on search engine results pages and a lower CPC.

Other factors affecting CPC include industry competitiveness, bid amount, ad rank, geographic location, and audience targeting.

A decrease in cost-per-click (CPC) means you pay less each time someone clicks on your ad. This leads to better ROI because your advertising budget goes further.

Low costs are great, but watch what happens with your conversion rates. You don’t want to sacrifice quality traffic for cheaper clicks.

The average CPC for Google Search Ads depends heavily on the industry you're in.

To see where you stand compared to competitors, look at the average CPC in your industry.

When you target the right audience, your CPC will be lower because your ads will appear to more relevant users.

Use demographics, interests, purchase intent, website activity, and lookalike audiences to reach the right target audience in your Google Ads campaigns. When users connect with your ads, click-through rates improve, which often lowers costs while maintaining or improving conversion rates.

Ad extensions let you include extra information in ads like contact info, ratings, and links to your website.

Ad extensions improve click-through rates and ad relevance without increasing costs. Extensions often lead to better ad placement and lower CPC through improved Quality Scores.