4 PPC Tactics to Lower Your CPA in Google Ads

PPC marketers look for reducing cost-per-acquisition (CPA) inside Google Ads, but it’s not as easy as one thinks.

It’s all because Google doesn’t provide a correct answer.

You’ll have to search extensively to get the answer and even though you won’t get a satisfying result for proven strategies to lower your CPA.

To lower the CPA in Google Ads, a PPC marketer needs to be experienced.

Even though if you’re not experienced, no need to worry as this article will help you to reduce the CPA in Google Ads.

Learn about CPA

According to Google, an average CPA is defined below-

“The price advertisers pay for every new customer they acquire, which is calculated by dividing the total cost of conversions by the number of conversions. Google determines the CPA based on your quality score.”

CPA means ROI of a campaign and reducing it will make more return for your PPC investment.

A low CPA is always favouring the advertiser’s interest to find more leads for less investment. Although an average CPA vary industry-wise.

There is a lot of variation between industries, so you should remember the value of you and your client’s conversion while reducing CPA.

Ways to Reduce Your CPA

#1 Strategically Target the Location

Location is quite important for successful PPC activities.

Suppose you set targeting location broad in Google Ads, there might be chances that you gonna serve them to poorly-converting regions.

These are the locations which haven’t performed over the last few months and hardly generated any conversion.

Go to Google Analytics to see if you’ve set Google Ads broad targeting and spending a lot of money.

Go to Audience > Geo > Location.

After reaching Google Analytics, you’ll see Sessions dropdown list available in the top left corner.

From the list, choose Conversion Rate inside Goal in order to find which are the most successful regions as well as which are not in terms of conversion.

Once PPC advertisers come to know which location is giving them the best profit, they can save their money.

This way you can effectively reduce your CPA and improve your campaign’s ROI.

#2 Focus on Quality Score with Defined Ad Structure

An advertiser’s quality score also matters when it comes to reduce CPA.

So, every marketer should improve his or her quality score.

It has been seen that if you optimize your quality score then that optimization result also helps to reduce CPA.

With years of experience, an advertiser certainly tries to improve quality score with factors like relevancy.

However, in the never-ending quest to improve quality score, campaign managers can sometimes ignore the importance of a clean ad structure.

This helps you improve your CTR and hence quality score.

SKAGs (single-keyword-ad-groups) is an ad structure that helps advertisers focus on only one keyword per ad group.

It should be noted that only make SKAGs for your best performing keywords and Google Analytics will help you know that.

#3 Employ Google Ads ‘IF Functions’

Google Ads “IF functions” have proved to be helpful for PPC marketers.

These functions enable marketers to set rules for their ads to present them in desired conditions.

Rules are like- “Only show my mobile ad IF the user is using a mobile device as shown in the examples from Google below.”

Putting rules in ads helps paid search marketers in two ways-

• Rules applied to ensure that the ads are relevant enough to make users click. Improving CTR would lead to enhanced quality score thus reducing CPA.
• Making ads useful and targeted to the user ensures you won’t have to pay for irrelevant clicks. This will also reduce costs.

To begin using IF Functions in Google Ads first ask yourself what part of your ad could be optimized.

If you’re going to use IF Functions in Google Ads, first try to know which ad part could be optimized.

Is it Audience or Pricing or Ad copy?

Then get to work experimenting and iterating on your results.

Then go for optimizing it relevantly for the users. Ongoing optimization is an assured way to minimize costs in paid search marketing.

#4 Use Google Ads Built-In Machine Learning

Machine learning and AI are two new technologies which have to prove beneficial to almost every industry.

Paid search marketing is no different and here is the proof.

Google Ads comes with a built-in machine learning which helps advertisers boost conversions and optimize ad performance.

Go back to Target CPA bidding under Google Ads.

Target CPA bidding is also known as Smart Bidding under Google Ads.

It includes an automatic bidding strategy in ads which are made to get your ads more conversions for the target CPA set by you.

As Smart Bidding is based on machine learning, advertisers can turn it on and set a lower CPA in order to see whether they can get the same results at a lower price.

Smart Bidding adjust bids using signals like-

• Device-type.
• Browser-type.
• Time.
• Location.
• Remarketing list.

Companies which manage Google Ads would rely on third-party machine learning to minimize CPAs as well.

Here is how third-party machine learning influenced CPA industry-wise in Google Ads-

Conclusion

PPC could cause puzzles to your mind if you’re not aware certain things regarding reducing the CPA.

Here are 4 ways that will not only help you get to reduce your CPA, but also improve your quality score like factor.