As usual, the world of digital marketing is constantly changing and developing. As marketers, it’s your job to ensure that you keep up and optimize your budget. There must be a significant ROI no matter how little or big you spend on your marketing efforts. It’s even better if you can reduce costs.
One of the factors to consider when you want to increase your ROI is your CPC. Cost-per-click is a pay-per-click bidding model where you pay every time someone clicks on your ad. Google and Facebook are two of the most popular and effective places to put your ads. However, it is competitive and can sometimes be expensive if you don’t have a strategy.
There are many easy ways you can lower your CPC and maximize your efforts. Here are some of them:
Google Ads
Use Negative Keywords
One of the things driving up your CPC is your ads getting triggered by irrelevant search queries. If your brand sells home fitness products and equipment, searchers looking for nearby gyms are a waste of your time and budget. You don’t have to appear in front of those people because they’re not your target audience.
An easy way to avoid this is by using negative keywords. Negative keywords can help to lower your CPC significantly. It prevents your ads from showing up in search results that are irrelevant to your brand’s goals.
This also helps increase your CTR (click-through rate), improve your Quality Score, and lower your CPC. Google uses Quality Score to determine which ads to show and how to rank them.
Schedule Your Ads
Another thing that might be running up your CPC is a lack of ad scheduling. It is unlikely that your target audience is actively searching for relevant things to your brand at all times of the day. If budget is a concern, a straightforward way to compromise is to schedule your ads.
Whether or not the budget is an obstacle, it’s best to follow a strategy in all your marketing efforts. The chances are that your audience is more active or has shown some behavior to indicate the best time to advertise. Follow that, and you can lower your CPC again by eliminating irrelevant searches.
Target a Specific Audience
On Facebook, it’s best to get as specific as you can with your target audience. This is one of the most important and influential ways of lowering your CPC. Running campaigns with a wide net is also not very effective. You may be reaching millions of people. But how many of those people are actually interested in and capable of engaging with your brand?
By being more specific, you can better know your audience and understand what works and what doesn’t work. From there, you can go beyond lowering your CPC. You can gather insight about your audience. When you narrow down your targeting, you’re thinning out the competition and making things so much easier on yourself.
Look for Audience Overlap
Facebook Ads tend to overlap your audiences, leading to you just bidding against yourself. You’re promoting different ad sets but all to the same audience. This is a massive waste of your time, effort, and money.
The first thing you need to do is look for the overlap to ensure that your carefully created ad and content don’t go to waste. You can simply use the Facebook Audience Overlap tool to check a significant overlap with your audiences.
The Bottom Line
CPC is only one small part of your marketing efforts and, therefore, your budget. However, it’s good practice to ensure that every aspect of your marketing efforts is optimized and performing to uplift your brand and connect with your audience. No action is too small or too big when it comes to digital marketing. It’s all about intention and strategy.
Learn more about how we can help your company execute paid advertising effectively and efficiently! Akby is a full-service marketing agency in Kansas that can help clients rank higher on search engines and improve their marketing efforts. Contact us today, and we can discuss how to push your brand forward!