Cost-per-click (CPC) is the cost a business pays every time a user clicks on their website’s ads. This number will determine how successful your PPC campaign is and how much the ads will cost.

It will also help you determine how wise it is to invest in search engine marketing.

The formula for calculating CPC is relatively simple. You only need to divide the total cost of your clicks by the total number of clicks.  For example, if an advertiser paid $300 for a campaign and it received 53 clicks, then the CPC would be $5.66. That $5.66 is the result of 300/53.

Devising a successful pay-per-click campaign can be challenging, but it is not impossible. The easiest way to ensure you get what you pay for is to follow a top-down approach and adjust the elements of paid search accordingly. These include:

A strategic marketing campaign. A paid search marketing campaign can contain different ad groups. You could take advantage of specific dates of the year to launch different groups. For example, for a Father’s Day Sale, Christmas, Cyber Monday, etc. Each of those dates represents an opportunity to maximize the success of your PPC campaign.

Ad groups. These keep you organized. The most efficient way of using them is creating several ad groups for your merchandise. See which of them attract more people and work around them. Study their relevance and keep improving your ads.

Ads. These are what users will see on search engines or websites. You want to optimize your ads so that they drive the highest amount of qualified traffic to your site.

Optimizing  CPC

Optimizing cost-per-click will highly depend on where you plan to run your PPC campaign. In the case of Google, carefully choosing your keywords is essential for your ads to be shown to exactly the people looking for your product or service. Take advantage of long-tail keywords and use negative keywords so that your ads are shown to your intended target market.

If you plan to advertise on social media, then you need to segment your ads correctly.

Having advertisements alone is not enough. The ad copy, which is the message written on the ads, needs to be carefully crafted. Consider your target audience and keep in mind three things: features, benefits, and calls-to-action.

Having a user click on your ad is half the work. This will give you a chance to convince them you have exactly what they need. Here’s where landing pages come into play.

Landing pages are created for the sole purpose of a marketing or advertisement campaign. It is where customers ‘arrive’ when they click on an ad. They must be built with purpose, to maximize conversion rate.