How To Lower Your Google Ads CPC! [Updated for 2022]

One of the most important metrics that you need to monitor in your Google Ads campaign is your CPC how much you are paying for each click. And the reason is simple. The lower the cost that you can pay for each click means that you have more of your important marketing budget to be able to spend to get more clicks and potentially get more customers and more sales. If you save 10% on your average cost per click in a month, it means that you have an extra 10% of marketing budget to be able to drive more sales and conversions. My name is Aaron Young and I'm your 15,000 hour Google Ads master. And in today's video, I'm going to show you three simple optimizations that you can add into your Google Ads account from today to start lowering your cpc. Let's go. Okay, let's look at a real life example here. What I want to show you is the results that we got over a 60 day period of adding in some extra optimizations. So first you can see here with our cost per click, this started up at $5.72 and we were able to bring it down to $4.44. Throughout that same time we got this click through ratio which started at 8.93% and we took it up to 11.38%. But probably what's more important here is if you look at this conversion data, we got the conversion data from just under $40 $39.55 all the way down to $21.27. And obviously at that same time, we saw a really strong growth in our conversion rate from 14.46 all the way up to over 20% at 20.89%. Before I take you through the exact steps that we took in order to lower the CPC and improve the overall account performance, you need to firstly understand the factors that affect your cpc. Now, as you're probably aware, Google Ads is based on an auction which is focused on keywords. So when you search for a keyword, you will see a selection of ads from businesses who are bidding on the same keyword. So as you can see in this example, we've got a collection of businesses who are all bidding on the search term swimming lessons for kids. Now, the good news is, is that in Google Ads, the highest bid does not always win. And this is because Google uses a formula to calculate the winning or the number one position. And the formula is your max CPC bid. So the maximum amount that you're willing to pay times by your quality score and then this gives you an ad rank and the Reason why Google uses this formula is because their goal is to match highly relevant ads and websites to the user's search inquiry. So Google isn't only focused on who is willing to pay the most money as Google's main go goal is to match highly relevant ads and websites for the user. So don't be filled into thinking that the way that you win a Google Ads auction is by being willing to pay the most amount of money. Because the most important thing in a Google Ads auction is your ad rank. So apart from your bids the amount you're willing to pay, other factors that affect your ad rank are the relevance of your ad to the search query, the relevance of your ad to your landing page, and the historical click through ratio or or CTR of your ads. So let's put this in a simple example. You are willing to pay $2 for your ad targeting women's summer dresses and your ads have a click through ratio of 12%. But your competitor is willing to pay $5 for their ad targeting women's summer dresses, but they only have a click through ratio of 3%. So who would the winner be? You or your competitor? The great news is is that you would win the auction as Google would prefer a 12% chance of $2 rather than only having a 3% chance of $5. The reason why Google with a 12% click through ratio versus your competitor who has a 3% click through ratio is quite simple. Even though your competitor is prepared to pay more than you for every 100 searches, Google is far more likely to earn more money from your ads. Let's break it down with a 12% click through ratio. That means Google will get on average 12 clicks for every 100 searches giving them $24, 12% click through ratio off your two dollar bid versus your competitor even though they're willing to pay $5 per click with a 3% click through ratio that means that they likely to get 3 clicks out of 100 searches giving them only $15. So even though your max CPC is less than half of your competitors, Google will actually earn on average $9 more through showing your ads. So this is an amazing opportunity for you as a business owner to make sure that your campaign is giving Google exactly what it wants of matching highly relevant ads with the user's search terms so that you can actually pay less money, get better results and more clicks with your marketing budget. So now that we know the factors that affect your cpc, let's go those three steps that you can implement into your account so that you can lower Your cpc. And the first thing is that you need to increase your keyword quality score. To check your keyword quality score in your campaigns tab, you want to go into search keywords and if you don't see this quality score column, you can go into columns, modify columns, search for quality score, and then you can add this into your list of columns. The goal here with your quality score is to have your quality score at least 8 out of 10. Ideally, the goal is 10, and as you can see through here, we've got the majority of our keywords already up at that 10 out of 10 score. Now, with your quality score, it is important to note that if you have a quality score of under three, you will actually see a status warning in here which will actually tell you that your ads are not eligible to appear. So if you find that you have a quality score which is under 7 out of 10, so a 5 out of 10 or a 6 out of 10, what you actually need to do is you need to do two things. Firstly, you want to go to your ads and you want to make sure that you're mentioning the keyword in your headline and in your description. So for this campaign we're targeting Skip In High. So you can see we've got it mentioned in our headlines and we've also got it mentioned in our description. Once again, for this ad we've got Skip in Hire mentioned in our headlines and we've also once again got it mentioned in our descriptions. And the second thing you then need to check is you need to actually check the landing page. And for this campaign you can see that once again, we have highly relevant information about Skip in Hire. It's mentioned here in the titles and then also in our content. As you go down the page, you can see time and time again that it's very clear that this page is about Skip Bins. So as a wrap up, the first thing you need to do to lower your cost per click is you need to come in and check your search keywords, making sure that you have a quality score of at least an 8 out of 10, a 9 out of 10 or a 10 out of 10, with obviously the goal being 10 out of 10. Hey, before we get to our next point, can you please quickly like this video and subscribe to my channel. This makes sure that I can keep creating this free content so that you can improve your Google Ads campaigns. Let's get back into the training. The second thing that you want to do in order to lower your cost per click is you want to update Your keyword match types to phrase and exact match. However, I do want to stress that for the first 30 or 60 days of your campaign, I would recommend using the broad match type for your keywords. And in this first 30 or 60 days, you want to be doing a search term audit every three or four days. Now, to do your search term audits, you're going into your search terms. And then what this is showing is this is showing the exact search queries that a user used in order for your ads to and as we go through this list, we want to be doing two things. Firstly, we want to be checking and adding in negative keywords for any irrelevant keywords. And then secondly, for any keywords that convert, we want to actually be going through and adding them in as a phrase match or an exact match. So we just click on those keywords which have converted and then we want to add them as new keywords to your campaign. It is important to note that very recently Google has actually just updated what a broad match, a phrase match, an exact match keyword actually is. So now, rather than matching the words that you've got in those phrases, it actually matches the meaning of those keyword phrases. So for example, in this account, even if we had the exact match keyword of Brisbane Skip Bin hire, our ads would still trigger and appear for searches would say waste bin hire. And the reason for that is that Google sees that Skip bin Hire and Waste bin Hire actually had the same meaning. So in the event that you actually want to filter out search terms in that example, you actually need to go through and physically add those similar meaning keywords as a negative keyword. I explain this change more fully in my video Google Ads in 2022. And what I'll do is I'll leave a link in the description so that you can watch that after you finish watching this video. And the third and final thing that you can do to lower your CPC is to actually use the keyword insertion feature in your Google Ads ad copy. And this is a feature that you can use which automatically updates your ads with the search query that the search user used in order to trigger your ad. To use the keyword insertion feature, you need to go into one of your ads and you can see here that we're using this keyword insertion feature in headline one. To use this feature in the headline, you need to type a brace or the squiggly bracket. Then you select keyword insertion and then from there it's just a matter of copying in the actual search term that you want to use. So for this example we're going to use Skip in Hire North Brisbane and then this is how your ad would actually appear in the search term. So you can see here, when we've typed in Skip in Hire North Brisbane, you can see that our ad has actually automatically updated to show Skip in Hyatt North Brisbane. So the benefits of using this keyword insertion in your ad copy is twofold. One, you can see from here that the user is more likely to click on your ad because your headline actually matches the actual search query that they typed into Google. And the second reason is is that Google will actually bold the elements of your headline which match the user's search and query. So by using the keyword insertion feature on your ads, you're getting a double benefit of increasing your ads relevancy but also remembering that Google will bold the elements of your ad which match the user's search inqu. So as a wrap up, if you want to lower your cpc, you need to take those three actions and start implementing them to your account today. Remember, you need to improve your quality score, use those phrase and exact match types when possible, and also start using keyword insertion in your ads. Why don't you leave a comment right now and tell me which one of those three suggestions you like the most? As you can see, having a very clear optimization strategy for your Google Ads campaign can make the world of difference not only to your cpc, but also to your conversion rates, the number of conversions you get, and ultimately your acquisition rate. And that's why I put together my free Google Ads Optimization checklist. This is a checklist that I still use today and it lets you know exactly what you need to optimize every week, every month, and every 90 days. Why don't you get your checklist right now by following the link below and I've also placed it in the description for you. Thank you again for watching my teaching. Hey, you may remember in Point two I spoke about the changes to match types that Google has just recently rolled out. If you want to find out more information about that, why don't you watch this video right here?