Does anyone have suggestions on how to achieve a lower CPC? I have some unrealistic, or seemingly unrealistic, industries that want to lower their CPC. The main two industries are auto insurance and staffing. This is highly competitive, but they have limited budgets and want more and guaranteed results with lower CPC. Any ideas are welcomed.
@Fer0 - thanks for the reply. I understand the CPC is tough to get around. Possibly more enticing advertisement (descriptions) will help. What do you mean by high quality score? I am assuming this is landing page per ad?
I agree that good CTR, high QS, and some age (with good performance) to the account helps with lowering the CPC. But I'm puzzled why this is the number one priority? To me the priority should be getting conversions. Bid high, bid low, either could potentially win you great gains with AdWords. CPA (cost per acquisition, or cost per lead/sale/conversion) is where you want to typically look. My mind is never on lowering the CPC, it's always, ALWAYS on lowering the CPA. Example: I have many clients who push for lowering the CPC. As a result their ads will often show in a lower position, and as a result will generate less clicks, and also the clicks are worth less. Why? Because whoever clicked on the ad saw you in spot number 8. It's likely they saw and clicked on other ads, too. So bidding harder, landing your ad in a higher position, will typically result in a better conversion rate. Whatever you're selling/pushing, a higher placed ad (and more expensive click) is more likely to get you what you want out of the visitor to your landing page. Simple. It depends on the industry of course, but this is in general. The best case scenario is always that you can bid low, show up at the top, and convert really well (get them to do what you want on the landing page). But in between that there's a hell of a lot of calculations to be made to figure out how you'll do in the world of AdWords. Sorry for the long post, but I am used to clients asking for lower CPC's, so this is a familiar topic for me in my daily working life. Hope I could contribute positively to the debate.
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Good quality score does help to lower your cpc, but you have to know that lowering your cpc doesnt mean anything...the best way is to choose a longer tailed (less competition) keyword that is more targeted to user. E.g: instead of generic word like "staffing", try "hiring skilled worker" or "where to find good HR companies". Understand that there are few types of users on Google, 1). searching for products/services 2). seeking information, 3). finding directions/locations/images/videos etc so by using a high cost keywords will only target the no.(2) info seekers, the click is not going to convert unless you have high budget and strong convincing landing page. Otherwise, dig into google help and read their guidelines on increasing quality score! Hope this helps....
Google takes into consideration many aspects for of your account. You have to take into consideration the quality score. To achieve a good QS you need to have relevant text ads for your landing page, the keywords have to be relevant to the ads and the landing page has to be relevant for the user. The best advice I could give you is to structure your campaigns in multiple ad groups based on main keywords. Make ad groups with 20-30 keywords all connected, 4-5 text-ads that should include the main keyword, and also be sure that the landing page contains some of the keywords. Use keyword planner tool from AdWords to plan your ad groups and to see what what is the average bid. Those numbers are not very accurate but you can make an idea of what's going on. Use geo targeting to deliver your ads only to the people that might be interested. And always test! There is no solution for getting a low CPC. Just test keywords, text-ads even some lading page A/B testing. See what brings you the results that you want. Try to add weekly new text-ads and stop the ones that don't bring good results.