For any content promotion campaign that uses paid methods, there is one factor that is essential to understand, the CPC, or Cost per Click. Today we will talk a little more about this element, how it works, and the best ways to make money from it.
What is CPC?
This term refers to the relationship between the total cost of an ad and the total number of clicks it received during the ad’s duration.
This relationship is fundamental as it firstly allows real management of the money spent promoting a specific product. Therefore, it is essential to monitor the results of the campaign in real-time to see whether or not the money being spent compensates for the results that are being obtained.
In this field, two elements must be distinguished, and the conclusion about the profitability of a campaign must be made taking into account the primary objective of the campaign. This means that if the objective is just to increase page views, then CPC will be important to know if the number of people viewing your website is high enough so that they can become customers in the future. When this happens, it is usually desirable for the CPC to be as low as possible, as this will result in a greater number of visitors.
However, this is not always the case, it may be the case that the campaign aims to sell a certain product, so calculations must be made with the amount of sales that can be achieved. In many cases, two or three sales are enough to have what is called ROI, or Return On Investment.
Relationship between CPC and Keywords
As previously mentioned in the post dedicated to Keywords, these are the terms that define the content of your posts, as such, they are what tell Google who the audience is that might be interested.
There is therefore a direct relationship between Keywords and CPC, as they are what will connect a seller with a customer. This relationship will affect the CPC value, that is, if a Keyword is very good because it is related to a certain product that sells a lot, then the CPC will be higher. This happens because in this case, sellers are willing to give more money so that their ad is associated with that Keyword, as in this case, the probability of obtaining sales is much greater.
In this sense, the objective is to look for a Keyword that has a high CPC, a good number of associated searches, and a low volume of competitiveness. If these conditions are met, then you are faced with a Keyword that has all the conditions to give a good ROI.
Factors that impact CPC
As mentioned, there is a direct relationship between the value of a Keyword and the CPC of an ad, but how is this relationship calculated? The answer is complex and varies according to several factors, of which we will try to summarize some of them here.
Category
The first element is the business category, this happens because there are businesses that are more competitive, more profitable, more essential, and more expensive than others and this ends up being reflected in your CPC.
Just think that there are digital products that are worth 20,000 dollars, in which case having a CPC of 30 dollars is perfectly acceptable, but the same is no longer true for a product whose value is 5 dollars, in which case the CPC should be the cheapest possible.
An example is anything related to financial and banking services or Home Improvement is usually one of the businesses whose keywords are more expensive. In the opposite direction, we have keywords related to artistic products, these are normally those with the lowest CPC.
Product Psychology
There is an obvious difference between a loaf of bread we buy in the supermarket and a painting we buy to put on the wall. More than what characterizes the two objects, it is how people buy them that matters for this theme.
The difference is that in the case of bread, as it is a basic product and fundamental to the diet, it is bought daily, it is cheap, and does not require much thought on the part of the customer to buy it. In the case of a painting, it is something that is much more expensive and is an object that is rarely purchased, as such, it requires the customer to have time to think and evaluate whether it is a good or bad decision.
This relationship influences the CPC, which becomes more expensive as a product is also more expensive and requires more time for the customer to decide to buy it.
Tendencies
The market is always changing and this is a reality that no one can do anything to change, so CPC values, the most valuable keywords, the most searched terms, and the most desired products are also constantly updated.
It is important to take this into account so that you can constantly update, and when I refer to constant I do not mean having to do it every day, but at least twice a month is recommended, of the CPC values of a given keyword that we are interested in.
How to know the CPC of a Keyword
After we have explained how the relationship between these two elements works, it becomes important to know how we can choose and search for keywords based on their average CPC.
Some applications and websites do this job, some are paid while others are not, with us on this blog we always give preference to non-paid websites, so let’s talk about two options here.
Google Keyword Planner
The first, and one of the best known, is Google Keyword Planner, which offers a free service to search for keywords, see their value, and find other similar options.
One of the great advantages of this application is that as it is part of Google, it searches for privileged information from the search engine itself, which allows for very reliable results.
When you enter the application, two options appear, either “Discover new keywords” or “Get search volume and forecasts”, you must select the first, write the keyword you want and you will have all the necessary information.
Semrush
This application, despite being free, has a paid plan for those who want even more information.
As soon as you enter the site, just write the keyword you want, choose the country, and search.
The results are quite organized, indicating the volume of sites that use this keyword, its difficulty, the overall volume of use, the type of keyword (whether it is commercial, informative, generalist…), the density of competition, how many ads are in this moment to use this keyword and of course the CPC, among much other information.
It is an extremely complete website and its use is highly recommended.
How to lower CPC
This is the last chapter of this post and perhaps the question that most interests anyone in the Digital Marketing field, as the instructions here refer to Google Ads.
The first thing to do is improve the Quality Score of our ad. This score is essentially determined by three elements: Expected DTR, that is, the probability of someone clicking on your ad; Relevance, that is, the similarity between the ad and the results that readers are looking for; and Landing Page Experience, that is, how relevant the Landing Page is in responding to readers’ objectives.
All of these elements can be improved and are solely dependent on the owner of the ad, as such, there must be dedication and effort when creating a Landing Page, a Blog, or a website.
Another way is to make our ad as relevant as possible to those looking for it, and the best way to do this is by choosing a set of very specific keywords. This way we are ensuring that the ad is focused on a specific group of audiences, thus increasing the likelihood that someone will click and find what they are looking for.
The Landing page plays an extremely important role in this process, as such, it should be as relevant and impactful as possible. Don’t forget that Google’s algorithm evaluates written quality, so it is essential not to write text with errors.
There are a few more small techniques that help to lower the CPC. If you want to know this topic in more depth, write in the comments.
Ricardo D’almeida
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