How to Decrease Cost-per-Click with Smart PPC Management

Harvesting organic traffic is the cheapest way to advertise your product, but sooner or later, you will have to cash out if you want to reach your target audience or boost your sales. Digital advertising is based on pay-per-click – paying a fee each time one of the ads is displayed on websites, social media, or search engines is clicked.

According to WordStream, the average cost per click in Google Ads is between $1 and $2 on the search network, and under $1 on the Display Network. However, this is just an average – in some industries such as law and insurance, this price can reach more than $50 per click. On Facebook, the majority of advertisers pay $0.55 per click (this is the median price), while on Instagram most businesses pay $1.09 for a click.

It doesn’t sound like too much, but it adds up – WordStream calculated the average small business using Google Ads will spend between $9,000 and $10,000 per month.

What further complicates things is that click doesn’t necessarily translate into desired customer’s action, making each acquired customer more expensive. This is where PPC management steps in. There are ways to optimize your paid campaigns to convert those clicks into leads or sales, but it takes knowledge and creativity.

We managed to generate sign-ups for as little as $0.30 per lead, and you can do it too. A lot of PPC management strategies revolve around keywords. In this article, we will show you how to step out of that box.

Lesson 1: It is not all about the click

By this point, it is clear that although you are paying for a click, it takes more to acquire a new customer. If 100 people click on your ad, and you paid each $1, you’ve spent $100. But if 2 people out of those 100 visitors actually buy your product, and the rest just leave your website without taking any action, it means you’ve spent $100 for 2 sales.

Moreover, if it was a one-time sale of two $10 products, it means you earned nothing and lost $80. On the other hand, if your product is a monthly subscription worth $100 each, your investment paid off.

So, while clicks and impressions are a prerequisite to selling a product, the main goal of PPC management is to look beyond this action and focus on what’s around the corner. When you calculate whether you are losing or earning money you have to keep in mind several things:

• Customer acquisition cost – calculated by dividing the budget spent on acquiring more customers (PPC ads, content creation and distribution, marketing tools, etc.) by the number of customers acquired in the budget period.
• Customer lifetime value – a prediction of the net profit attributed to the entire future relationship with a customer.
• Return on ad spend – the total revenue generated via PPC ads divided by the total spend on that channel
• Return on investment – a percentage that expresses how much revenue you gained from marketing in comparison to what you spent
• Product margins – the difference between the selling price and the product cost. To calculate the product margin, the gross profit margin is divided by the selling price and expressed as a percentage.

Depending on the complexity of your business, you may or may not use all of these metrics. Of course, some of these metrics go beyond PPC marketing and focus on your overall strategy which may include acquiring customers through organic search, word-of-mouth or traditional sales.

Having a holistic view of your entire marketing strategy and revenue it brings should give you a clear guideline on the budget you should allocate to PPC management and paid ads. So we won’t complicate things – in this article, we will focus on PPC management and the simplest way to decrease CPC in three steps:

• Maximize click-through rate, and minimize the money you are losing
• Maximize the value of each click by tying a follow-up visitor’s action into it (lead generation)
• Maximize sales conversion by optimizing campaigns (segmentation and split testing)

Let’s see how you can put that into action.

Lesson 2: Maximize CTR with Interactive Content

Years and years of abusing online space for incessant advertising has left online marketers in a position where traditional marketing tactics no longer work. You’ve probably heard about the famous banner blindness – the way we trained ourselves not to see banner content even if it is blasting us from the middle of the page.

Furthermore, people have become wary of brands that come across as too sales-y and pushy, even if they are sliding into our field of vision spontaneously, from our social media newsfeed.

In that environment, what is the average click-through rate you can expect for a PPC ad? According to WordStream, average CTR on AdWords is about 2%.

On Facebook, most advertisers have 1.44% CTR, while on Instagram this numbers drops to 0.67%. However, these numbers can vary across the industries so you can take a closer look into these benchmarks here.

But is there a way to boost these numbers? Sure!

So what’s the trick? In 2019, good marketing is all about building a trusting, friendly relationship, hence the ever-growing popularity of content marketing.

According to Content Marketing Institute (CMI), 86% of B2C marketers said content marketing is their key strategy, as it successfully increased engagement and lead generation. Around two-thirds of them, however, faced a serious challenge with producing engaging content.

This is your chance to enhance the CTR – go interactive! Take a look at these stats:

• 88% of marketers say interactive content differentiates them from their competitors
• Buzzfeed gets over 75% of its quiz traffic from social media (hello, that is insane CTR right there!)
• Interactive content generates 4-5x more pageviews than static content
• 79% of marketers agree interactive content brings them repeat visitors and multiple exposures

Many marketers steer clear from interactive content because it is often associated with the complex creation process, but this is just a prejudice. You can create a good quiz in just under an hour, and any work you put into it will surely pay off if we tell you that well-crafted quizzes can score a 50% lead capture rate and 39% click-through rate.

Running a quiz as an ad instead of a classical ad will help you:

• Capture attention
• Boost CTR
• Generate engagement
• Raise brand awareness

Of course, quiz requires engaging questions, catchy headline, and most importantly, topic that taps into your target audience’s needs and interests. While w will elaborate on that in the next section, in the meantime, you can find tips on how to come up with catchy quiz title ideas.

Lesson 3: Maximize Click Value with Lead Generation

The purpose of quizzes does not end with a mere click. The goal behind a quiz is to generate an email sign-up, also known as a lead. Lead generation is one of the most prioritized marketing goals and for a good reason. People who willingly give you their email address are people who are actually interested in what you have to say or sell.

Growing an email list with highly-qualified leads means you’re not dispersing your efforts and money on the large audience that feels indifferent to your message and product. It allows you to engage with people who are likely to buy from you.

Furthermore, it keeps people close to you – your PPC ad may attract a visitor to your website, but if you don’t convince them to buy your product immediately, there are two scenarios. They will leave your website and never come back, or you’ll have to repeatedly target them with paid ads until they are ready to buy.

When you get people to sign up for your email list, you stay in contact with your website visitor, and any further re-engagement with them comes for free (notwithstanding the costs of email automation software or content creation).

So how do you get people to sign up? On first glance, quizzes are an irresistible clickbait, but in fact, they are so much more than that. Quizzes enable you to educate and entertain your audience, tap into people’s innate psychological needs for self-reflection, approval, belonging, and competition.

Based on your marketing objectives and the type of product you are advertising, quizzes can be categorized into three groups:

Trivia quizzes are the type of content that made Buzzfeed famous. Although they are often silly and somewhat absurd, they are a great viral material, making it a perfect PPC ad for building awareness, a sense of connection with the brand, and product placement.

For example, Southern e-commerce company Bourbon&Boots was quickly burning through its budget with PPC ads that cost ultimately $1.50 per lead. Seeking to cut back on their expenses, they created seven trivia and personality quizzes, based on different buyer personas for their products. Their trivia quiz went viral and got shared over 26,663 times, generating over 23,675 leads in just three weeks.

Personality quizzes seek to tell respondents something about themselves. In terms of marketing, this usually means offering them a personalized message or solution to their challenge. These quizzes are great lead generators and they can also help you segment your potential customers into groups with specific needs.

For example, real estate agent Devi Cooper created a simple “Which neighborhood is right for you?” style quiz. She advertised it on Facebook and kept in touch with her leads by sharing personalized content. When leads would click to her website, she did personal outreach and shared incentives. She managed to decrease CPC to $0.40. Final result? More than $10,000 commission for a $50 ad spend!

Finally, knowledge quizzes can be trivia-based, or they can be dedicated to niche segments of your audience with very specific needs and requirements.

Cavallo Hoof Boots sell an alternative protection to horses’ feet that enables people to avoid nailing horseshoes into them. However, many people have no idea this alternative even exists, and the quiz was a great way to change that. They created a quiz titled Are You Taking Proper Care of Your Horse?

People clicked on the ad, took a quiz, had their results delivered alongside educational content about hoof boots. This cost Cavallo Hoof Boots only $0.22 per lead, at the time when the average lead in the industry was around $0.54. Mind it, this meaningful action turned out cheaper than just a mere click! This allowed them to build a large list in a short time – over 20,333 leads in only 4 months!

Of course, creating a quiz that will generate highly-qualified leads is not all about coming up with the right questions – it is also about targeting the right audience with a quiz PPC ad. Your ad copy needs to be attractive and show clear value for the respondent.

Finally, a quiz will give you so much more than a lead.

Lesson 4: Optimize Campaigns with Segmentation, Tracking and Split Testing

Based on respondents’ answers to your quiz questions and their final results, you can easily segment your leads into separate groups and target them with email campaigns adjusted to their interests, needs, and level of buyer readiness.

For example, take a look at this dental marketing quiz, where I used one specific question to target and segment particularly “difficult” leads. In terms of this quiz, “difficult” leads are respondents who rarely visit the dentist.

Everyone who picked answer D was lead to an extra question that identifies the reason for rare visits.

This allows you to shape your offer by directly responding to your customer’s specific challenges, in this case – fear or problematic finances.

Furthermore, PPC management requires constant optimization and split testing. A quiz is not magically going to decrease your CPC. You have to look at everything:

• CTR for the headline and ad copy optimization
• The quiz completion rate for quiz content optimization
• Sign-ups for landing page optimization
• Onsite behavior and email campaign engagement for sales funnel optimization

The first point that decreases CPC, and therefore by cost per lead, is by testing different ad targetting for the best CTR. It takes is the easiest and most straightforward part of the process. Bourbon&Boots did that with their quiz by testing different advertising platforms. On Pinterest, they were able to get their CPC down to $0.03!

Once you boost your CTR, your CPC may drop, but the cost per lead may still remain high. It means you are still aren’t generating enough leads. It could be because people are dropping out of your quiz, or your landing page needs some work.

Medicinal herbals manufacturer Barlow Herbal Specialties attempted to decrease her PPC costs with a quiz that had more than 25 questions. The questions were very situational and hard to answer, which led to people to abandon the quiz midway. Once she simplified and shortened it, people started signing up, and lower CPC was also reflected in a lower cost per lead, which dropped to $0.45/lead.

Finally, tracking visitor’s engagement with your website and email campaigns will allow you to further optimize your sales funnel. One extremely easy way to do that with quizzes is to install Facebook Pixel before you run a Facebook ad for your quiz.

It can help you create custom Facebook audiences based on the answers they gave, or the way they further interacted with your website, allowing you to segment your audience and effectively and automatically target (and spend money on) the right audience. If you need a guide to optimize Facebook Pixel with a quiz maker, find it here.

Conclusion

This is one of the ways to revamp your PPC management. If you’ve looked at other guides, you may have noticed that they usually go in circles, focusing on keywords within the limitations of AdWords and other advertising platforms.

Our way is a different way. Decreasing CPC with quizzes means thinking out of the box, and decreasing your ad spend by making your sales funnel as independent from the PPC model as possible.

Solid PPC management requires thinking beyond the immediate marketing objectives and taking into account your (of your client’s) entire business and marketing model. This strategy worked for all the LeadQuizzes clients we mentioned in the examples, and it can work for you. The first step is easy – just click below!