Alex Hogan 'Associate Director of Marketing' at PushON presents his tips and tactics for cost-effective navigation of CPC surges at Brighton SEO April 2024.
Alex talks about what CPC surges are, what caused them, and offers some tips and tactics to reduce the impact on your advertising budget.
2. What are CPC Surges?
“Increases in CPC
over a period time
which result in the
cost of traffic via
Google Ads, or other
paid platforms, to
rise”
3. The cause of CPC surges
“This can happen due to a variety of
external factors like change in
competition, ad position in line with
campaign goals, and seasonality”
4. No Control
Some Control
Full Control
Increase Competition & Seasonality
Increased Cost
More
Advertisers
Increased Personalisation & Automation
Automation
Strategies
Pmax Strategies
Poor Management & Landing Pages
Minimal Best
Practice
Low Quality
Scores
Level of Control
The Cause Examples
5. What is the challenge (Micro)?
Cost of traffic increases which may mean
ROAS drops
1
2
3
Campaigns hit daily budgets faster impacting
visibility of products or ads
Outranked by competitors due to lower
impression share
6. What is the challenge (Macro)?
PPC becomes a less profitable channel and
harder to justify
1
2
3
Harder to fill the funnel at the top
Less budget to convert users at the bottom of
the funnel
Rely more on Organic Search which may need
additional resource or cost
4
12. Google Trends – Spikes in interest
Auction insights – Impression share
Bid Caps
Automated Bidding
GA4 & Data Tools
SEMrush - Competitors
Data Analysis and Monitoring
Tools to help understand changes
outside of our control
Tools that are impacting CPC within our
control
16. Google Ads Quality Score
User
Experience
Keyword
Relevance
Expected
CTR
Quality
Score
17. Improving your CTR on Google Ads can positively
impact your Quality Score by signalling relevance
and user engagement, lowering costs while
increasing ad position AKA paying less CPC to
maintain or increase ad rank
1 2
Keeps ads relevant Keep ads optimised
Quality Score - CTR
18. Keywords Ads
CRO / Heatmaps
Measure Quality Score
Optimise
Repeat
“Landing pages are the
first interaction a customer
will have with a brand.
They set the tone for the
relationship”
Quality Score – Keyword to Landing Pages
Landing
Pages
24. Takeaways
1
2
3
Understanding the surge is half the battle
Budget Caps, Quality Score & Campaign
Structure are key to navigation
The CPC surge is not always within our control
Editor's Notes
What are we here to talk about and to understand why we see CPC surges, we need to understand the root cause
The bane of most advertiser’s lives & the reason our accounts underperform
- How does google define a CPC surge
To best explain this we can look at 3 element
The cause of CPC surges
Examples of how these causes occur
And how much control we have
What challenges to we face on our accounts and the day to day management
What are the wider impacts of the surges
It’s also important to analyse where we compare to other companies in our industries
This chart has been created using account insights that we have managed as well as other data that we have access to will be available on the pushon website after the conference
Now, what does this look like in reality- Capitalised on the dip in CPC at the start of COVID when marketing budgets were dropped
- As advertisers return in 2021 CPC spikes- There is a further spike in CPC during the peak trading period
Now how do CPC changes impact the wider KPIs and metrics
THANKFULLY, through the tips I am going to share, we managed to turn it around and reduce CPC year-on-year whilst increasing ROAS
Halfway point
Similar to the chart at the start of the talk, we need to look at what is in our control and what is not
Interest results in more competition, auction insights to track these competitors in the space and SEMrush to understand their budgets
Is our automated bidding causing CPC to spike due to market changes, GA4 will give us a wider scope and bid caps allow us to control
Example here of using Google trends to understand why the cost of traffic for Stanley Mug as a term may have increased all of a sudden
Increase in demand = increase in competition
Advertisers must be prepared to adjust their budgets to accommodate higher CPCs. Regular monitoring and fine-tuning of budgets will be essential to maintain cost-effective campaigns.
Is the bid strategy in place right, when costs are increasing
Are the campaigns in place delivering. You need to increase conversion rate and/or AOV. Can Pmax do this for example
Take it back to basics
Quality score impacts CPC
Good quality score = lower CPC
If we are seeing our CPCs spike, always look at CTR
Need to have a constant rotation of keeping ads relevant and optimizing
Google wants to reward advertisers with strong landing pages
implement the following measured approach to optimise quality score across all its 4 major componentskeywords, ad copy/assets and landing page, following a 30-days performance monitor to observe changes & repeat optimisation process
-b2b client
-high funnel and prospecting becoming expensive
-impacts costs at on the bottom line
Combine on-brand search with pmax with account level negatives and display
By combining the CRM and the account we were able to effectively manage lead quality in line with the changes
CSS Providers
20% saving which can result in 20% more traffic for your spend
Click Fraud
Click fraud affects almost every industry, with 90% of all campaigns on Google Ads being impacted in some capacity.
If cost of traffic increases we want to increase conversion rate and therefore a tool like this increases traffic quality
- It is really important that when analysing CPC surges that we know what is within our control and what is not