5 Ways to Lower Your Cost Per Action (CPA)

Last week we gave you five tips on how to get more leads from PPC. But what if your main problem isn’t leads? Everyone wants more leads, of course, but what if your most immediate problem is that your PPC campaign just isn’t profitable? (Not sure if your CPA is good or not? Check out our data on average cost per action in Google Ads.)

In this post we’ll walk through five more tips, this time for lowering your CPA.

5 ways to lower your CPA in Google Ads

1. Lower your bids

Cost per action, or cost per conversion, follows this basic equation:

Cost / Conversions = CPA

Yes, we’re talking about ways to get conversions for cheaper, so it’s pretty obvious that we might want to do something about the conversion end of this equation, but all too often I see people ignore the cost side to their own peril.

Many times, there’s a range of conversions that you can expect from your site. You can always work to improve conversion rates, but if your site’s traffic from SEO and your historical PPC traffic converts at a pretty steady rate and you don’t have the resources to do a lot of conversion optimization, you may be looking at something like this:

($5.00/click * 10 clicks) *.05 = $2.50 CPA

The .05 represents our conversion rate: 5%. If our target CPA is $1.00, and the conversion rate on our site is 5% we just can’t support $5.00 a click. This seems pretty straightforward and obvious, but the reality is it’s a calculation a lot of advertisers just don’t do before they jump into conversion optimization efforts.

Understand what your conversion rate is and what your CPA is, and know what you can comfortably pay for each click, on average, to make your account or a segment of your account profitable.

2. Find more specific keywords to target

In the last post we pointed you to a keyword expansion guide and another post on how to expand your keyword list and called out keyword research and expansion as a means for generating more leads – expanding and refining your keyword list can also help you to lower your CPA.

A great means of lowering your CPA can be to kill off or lower bids on “head” or shorter terms and find more specific keywords from methods like:

• Mining search queries
• Using broad match to find inexpensive traffic
• Finding long-tail keywords to target

3. Increase Quality Score

This starts with improving your campaign structure. Break down your paid search campaigns to create tighter, more relevant keyword groups, which will help enhance the effectiveness (and clickability) of your ad.

This increased clickability and improved relevance will lead to increases in Quality Score – that means a pricing discount and lower costs per click and per conversion.

4. Analyze your offer types

Again this is a similar tip with a different twist to our advice around drive more leads: here you want to look at your offer strategy with an eye towards inefficiencies.

If you’re offering a whitepaper download, it may look from the equation mentioned earlier that you’re doing okay within this campaign – you’re converting at what you’ve deemed to be an acceptable level. But you need to make sure that you’re converting at an acceptable rate to sale. How do whitepaper downloaders convert to actual paying customers? Again it seems obvious, but many businesses don’t have a strong handle on this number.

You can also take different audience segments that aren’t converting profitably and test pushing them to a different offer, as creating new leads may not only get you more leads, but can also drive down your CPA (more leads for the same price!).

4. Qualify with your ad text

Good click-through rates are great and can drive more traffic, but a great way to lower CPAs is to analyze your existing ad text to look for ads that are driving too much of the wrong traffic. Find ads that have a high CPA and think about the messaging – are you being too vague? Could a more specific ad that includes more details (price, the type of product, etc.) and better syncs with your landing page ensure that you have fewer stray clicks and better conversion rates? If so you might have an opportunity to qualify out bad clicks and improve your cost per acquisition.