It’s the best of strategies, the worst of pitfalls. It’s a tale of two goals: either to increase your clicks or to decrease your advertising costs.
The Formula
Before we dive into the rest of the newsletter, let’s discuss first how Cost Per Click (CPC) is computed. As its name suggests, the figure is obtained through the following formula:
Cost per Click = Advertising cost / Number of Clicks.
So for example, in your $200 back-to-school ad campaign, you garner about 76 clicks, then your CPC would amount to 2.632.
This metric can be used for many types of ads including, but not limited to:
- Text ads
- Shopping ads
- Image ads
- Video ads
- Twitter promoted tweets
- Facebook ads
- Instagram ads
- LinkedIn ads
The Opportunity Cost in Advertising
As we’ve mentioned before, it’s best to always have a primary goal you can devote most of your attention and resources to. However, with the limited resources a marketing team has, it becomes a game to find the best balance for your campaigns.
Either raise the bids (ie. the cost) or opt for fewer clicks. However, this doesn’t spell doom. Be creative in your strategies in order to make sure that each action and element is optimized and geared towards attaining the most conversions.
Keyword Research
There are many different types of keywords you can use, each one with different goals and bid prices. The key thing here is finding keywords that are:
- not too competitive that the price is not worth the conversions you’ll bring in
- not too obscure that no one searches for them
Be in the shoes of your potential clients and see what they might be curious about, and leverage that knowledge in your keyword research.
You can also use negative keywords for irrelevant queries and poor-performing keywords to lower the amount you’re expending to your campaigns. Besides that, you can choose manual vs. automated bidding, depending on the outcome you want.
Optimizing Landing Page
Following the formula we showed, in order to decrease costs, you have to increase conversions. This means that wh you secured a click, you better present a website that is streamlined for sign-ups. Limit distractions and provide a clear path that your potential clients can follow.
Among the elements you can improve include:
- Headline and copy
- Landing Page Form
- Call to Action Buttons
- Loading Time
- Visuals
- Sale Specials
Other Helpful Tips:
- Only show ads during profitable times to lower costs by scheduling your ads.
- Make sure your ads are primed for the right audience with ad groups. Read more about it in our article here.
- Make sure the Quality Score of your ads are high to drive in as many clicks as possible.
- Have a clear and concise campaign objective to guide you through your advertising decisions.
- Do A/B testing in order to use the best-performing assets.
- Be purposeful in your audience targeting. Should you cast the net wider or make it more niche? Each will have its own consequences.
You want to make your marketing dollars generate as much profit as possible. The only way to eliminate costs is to be vigilant with all the strategies you employ.
