A cheaper cost per click is one of the most common things clients ask me for. Most accounts run on automated bidding now, so Google sets the bid in every auction and there's no manual CPC to pull down. What you can still influence is how good Google thinks your ads and landing pages are, and that has a real effect on what you end up paying for each click.
This project is a good example of that. By rebuilding a set of landing pages so they matched the keywords sending traffic to them, I brought the average cost per click across the account down by 21%.
The Setup
The client was a lead generation business that relied on Google Ads for new enquiries. The account itself was in decent shape. The ad groups were tidy, the keywords in each one were tightly themed and the ads were written around those keywords.
The problem was where all that traffic ended up. The carefully grouped keywords were sending people to a handful of broad pages covering everything the business did. If you searched for one specific service and clicked the ad, you'd land on a page where that service was mentioned somewhere, just not clearly and not at the top.
I see this a lot. Building a page for every ad group feels like a lot of work, so one page that covers everything seems like a sensible shortcut. The trouble is it quietly costs you money on every click.
What Google Was Telling Me
Quality Score is Google's rating out of ten for each keyword. In the Google Ads interface you can see the three parts it's made up of: expected click-through rate, ad relevance and landing page experience. Each one is rated below average, average or above average, so you can see exactly where Google thinks you're falling short.
In this account the ads and keywords were holding up well. Landing page experience was the one Google had marked as below average, and once you clicked through to the pages it was easy to see why.
That matters because Quality Score feeds into how your ad is ranked in each auction. Roughly speaking, a better score means you can win the same auctions for less, so each click costs you less. That holds whether you set bids yourself or let Google's automated bidding do it for you.
So the plan was simple. Fix the landing pages, get that part of the score up, and the cost per click should come down with it.
What I Did
I rebuilt the landing pages so each one matched the ad group sending traffic to it. If an ad group was about one specific service, the page led with that service, using the same words people were searching for. The headline matched the search, the opening answered the question they'd come with and the rest of the page followed through on what the ad had promised.
There's nothing clever about it. The search, the ad and the page all need to line up, so the person clicking gets what they were looking for straight away.
What Happened
I gave the new pages time to build up enough data before comparing anything, and the numbers moved the way I'd hoped.
The average cost per click across all keywords came down by 21%, so the same budget was buying noticeably more clicks.
One keyword dropped by 43%. Its old page had the biggest gap between what people searched for and what they found, so it had the most room to improve.
Landing page experience moved from below average to average, and the other two parts of Quality Score stayed where they were. The pages were the only thing I'd changed, and landing page experience was the only part of the score that moved.
Why It Worked
Google wants to show ads that lead somewhere useful, and it rewards you when they do.
When someone clicks an ad about a specific thing and lands on a page about that same thing, they find what they need faster. Google picks up on that, rates the landing page more highly and charges you less for the click.
The old pages were decent enough on their own. They were just being asked to be relevant to dozens of different searches at once, and no single page can manage that. Give each ad group its own page and you fix the relevance problem at the source.
What This Means for You
A lower cost per click makes your budget go further. The same spend buys more clicks, or the same number of clicks costs you less.
It's worth checking where your ads are sending people. If you add the Quality Score columns to the keywords view in Google Ads, you can see how Google rates the landing page experience for each keyword. If a lot of them say below average, or every search is landing on the same one or two pages, there's probably money being wasted. It's something I come across a lot, it's usually very fixable and it's exactly the kind of thing a PPC audit should pick up.
I enjoy this kind of work because it gets more out of the budget you're already spending. Paying less for each click while sending people somewhere relevant is one of the most cost-effective improvements you can make to a Google Ads account.
If you're spending on Google Ads and you're not sure your budget is working as hard as it could, that's exactly the kind of thing I can help with. Drop me a message or book a free discovery session and we can take a look at your account together.
