The vast majority of Google’s profits come from AdWords advertising, as brands compete to appear top of popular keyword search results. Shawna Beaudet, PPC Account Director at Harvest Digital, looks at the highest cost per click ads within Google.
Typically insurance, finance and gambling have always demanded the highest CPCs in the UK and these have been rising higher year on year. Still, I was surprised to see that there are now single clicks that now cost over £100.
Tips for businesses in expensive PPC categories
Quality Score – if anyone tells you it’s impossible to get 10/10 quality score in highly completive terms, they are trying hard enough. It’s absolutely critical to test ad copy, landing pages thoroughly to achieve this though. We have achieved Quality Scores of 10 on terms such as “loans” and “short term loans” using these techniques.
Utilize every lever you have to cut out wastage – audience demographics like age and gender can allow you to add exclusions or bid modifiers to these terms. Use your Remarketing Lists for Search to split from your main campaigns to allocate budget to these first. Day parting analysis and heat maps will help you to determine when you can afford to pay less, or not at all.
Landing page optimisation – there are 2 factors at play here, firstly the element that fits into quality score but also the conversion rate you get on this page which will affect how much a click is worth to you. One element people often overlook is page speed which is becoming more and more important.
Device strategy – firstly you must know your performance of desktop and mobile but further than that, to deduce what role does mobile play in your journey. It’s crucial you use mobile bid modifiers to target the position that works for desktop and mobile separately. If using a bidding platform the interplay between these can certainly be off and requires manual intervention.
Positional strategy – the CPCs above are a suggested bid for position 1-3. If you are targeting lower positions you could be paying significantly less.
CPCs will only continue to be inflated, however, there are ways to take a piece of the pie while minimizing your wastage by analysing all of the data points at your disposal, bid modifiers, ad copy and landing pages. Happy bidding!
By Shawna Beaudet
PPC Account Director
Harvest Digital