Lowering Your CPC

There are ways that you can work towards lowering your cost per click and in order to maximize your exposure and minimize your advertising costs, focusing on achieving the lowest CPC should be a very important part of your Adwords marketing campaign.

There are a couple of ways that you can do this:

Increase Your Bid

There are many reports on the market that indicate that the best way to decrease your CPC is by initially bidding high, attempting to reach the first or second placement in Sponsored Listings. 

Then, after a couple of days check to see if the minimum required bid amount has decreased.  If so, you can modify your campaign to decrease your bid and retain top position due to your higher quality score.

Move Slow & Steady

Other reports indicate that starting off small and moving your way up is the easiest way to get started, and will ultimately lower your risk of losing money.

By starting off at a lower bid you are able to gradually increase it as your results improve. 

Apart from the maximum amount you are willing to pay per click, you will also have to set your daily budget within your Adwords account.

Your Daily Budget is the amount that you feel comfortable paying each day for exposure within Google’s search engine.

I suggest that you set a small budget when you begin, increasing it over time as you become more familiar with writing ad copy, selecting keywords and bidding.

This means that you should set a low end budget that you can afford without going too low and losing potential exposure to your advertisements.

Many new Adwords users start off with a $10.00 daily budget and increase it gradually over time.

Just keep a watchful eye on your campaigns and if you see one that is doing well, begin to increase the maximum bid on those keywords, while also increasing your daily budget.

Personally, I always begin with a higher max bid, usually at $.40 – $.55 so that I can begin to beef up my quality score and generate targeted traffic from my campaigns.

As your quality score increases, you should lower your maximum bid for each campaign until you are settled into a comfortable position and paying less per click.

For example, starting out with a $.55 click (slightly over $.50 to beat out anyone setting their max at $.50 a very common amount), you could begin in position #3, but as your quality score improves, you could lower your maximum bid to as much as $.30 and maintain the same position in the sponsored results.