The success of a pay-per-click campaign is dependent on understanding your audience inside and out.
You can reduce the cost of your advertising if you know your audience: what are their habits? Can you predict their search queries? Do they have similar behaviors, like shopping online at a certain time of day? Is their geographical location important for converting?
Knowing these details and implications, and applying that knowledge to your Google Ads campaigns will help you reduce your advertising costs overall, and reduce your cost per lead.
Here are five ways to reduce your Google Ads cost per lead (CPL).
When it comes to PPC, the more specific you can be, the better. While it’s easy to fall back on general keywords, the more you can pinpoint a specific audience, the more likely you are to create relevant ads, keywords, and content and to convert potential customers into buyers.
For example, while a broad keyword might include “a car driver in California,” a phrase match might be “a Toyota driver who lives in Southern California.” An exact match might be “a Toyota Prius driver in Los Angeles.” When you can narrow down to specific Los Angeles Prius drivers, you can write keywords that will speak to their specific needs and increase your click-through rates (CTR).
It’s always a good idea to do a biannual audit of your keywords to make sure that what worked for your website in the past is still working. Often, user behavior changes, or maybe keywords that used to convert don’t anymore. Regardless of the reason, you’ll want your keywords to be as up to date and relevant as possible to avoid paying for needless clicks.
While conducting a review of your search queries, you're almost certain to find searches that aren't great fits for your products or services, and shouldn't therefore trigger your ads. By watching for this behavior in your search queries, you can find potential negative keywords to help reduce your CPL.
Negative keywords are the keywords you want to eliminate from your search queries, ones that originate from sources who are not likely to convert. For example, if your company is selling family law consultations, you might want to designate the term “free” as a negative keyword to eliminate searches looking for free legal advice.
Two ways that you can search for negative keywords are in the Google Keyword Planner or the Search Query Report. While both are generally used to help generate new keywords, you can also home in on the search queries that aren’t suitable and add them to your negative keyword list for your ad campaigns. Correctly identifying and using negative keywords lowers your CPL in the long run.
Search engines reward advertisers who create intelligent and relevant ad campaigns by charging them fewer dollars per click. This means that ads that are more specific and relevant to your audience will cost you less than ads with lower quality scores. In fact, you can save up to 50% on your PPC with a high quality score.
Your quality score is based on three metrics:
So time and money spent on increasing your CTR, doing A/B testing on landing pages, and checking load times on your site—are methods that can affect your quality score, which can also lower your CPL. Read our blog on the Best Ways to Improve Google Quality Score for more detailed information on how to increase your quality score.
Segment and evaluate your campaigns by device, geographical location, and network or by the hour of the day and the day of the week. Do you see any patterns? Do more conversions take place on the weekends? Do conversions not happen on mobile devices or tablets? Or maybe you notice users in geographical locations that are clicking on your ads a lot but aren’t buying anything on your website.
Drill down into your campaigns and exclude these audience segments from your ads. This sort of detail will reduce your CPL and help you understand your audience’s behavior better.
Google Ads extensions generally improve CTR by extending your ad and offering more information on the search engine results page. Extensions can be call buttons, links to your website, location information, phone numbers, and more. Keep in mind that extensions are not guaranteed to show on every search query, but the better your quality score, the more likely they are to appear to potential customers. And there’s no additional cost to use them, which is an added benefit.
Here are some different types of extensions you can use in your Google Ads:
Now that you know that understanding your audience is the best way to optimize your Google Ads, you can get started on lowering your cost per lead. But if you need help with managing your Google Ad campaigns, get in touch. We'd love to bring our strength in PPC strategy and optimization to your business.