If you’ve noticed your cost per click creeping up week after week, you’re not imagining it. Rising CPCs are a real, widespread issue across most industries.
More advertisers, more automation, fewer ad placements, and search behaviour constantly shifting all push costs upward. The result is simple: you end up paying more for the same click.
The good news is you’re not powerless. There are practical, proven ways to bring CPCs down without tanking performance or chasing cheap clicks that don’t turn into leads or sales.
Here are four strategies we use regularly to lower CPC while keeping results strong.
1. Improve Your Quality Score
Quality Score still matters. Not because it magically halves your CPC overnight (it won’t), but because it applies steady downward pressure on your costs over time.
Google Ads is an auction. If competitors start bidding harder, or switch to Smart Bidding, prices can rise even if your Quality Score is solid. But a weak Quality Score guarantees you’ll pay more than you need to.
Think of it like this: Quality Score is the part you can control in an increasingly automated auction. So it’s worth controlling.
How to improve it
Ad relevance
Make sure your ads match the intent of your keywords. If someone searches for a specific thing, your ad should reflect that specific thing. Dynamic Keyword Insertion can help here when used carefully.
Landing page experience
Speed, mobile usability, and relevance still matter. If your ad promotes “Men’s Black Trail Running Shoes” and your landing page is a generic “Shoes” category, Google will notice. And so will your CPC.
Click-through rate (CTR)
Write ads that people actually want to click. Benefits, outcomes, clear calls to action. Extensions help too. Sitelinks, callouts, structured snippets. Use them properly and CTR goes up, CPC often comes down.
2. Test Broad Match Keywords (Carefully)
Broad match can lower CPC. That’s not marketing hype, it’s something we see in account data pretty consistently.
But broad match is not a free lunch. It can lower relevance if you let it roam unsupervised, especially in niche accounts.
So yes, test it. But do it like a responsible adult.
A strong setup is to run broad match alongside exact match in the same ad group. Broad match now uses the other keywords in the group as signals, so feeding it high-intent exact terms helps it aim properly.
The goal is not just cheaper clicks. It’s cheaper clicks that still convert.
If broad match brings CPC down but conversion rate falls off a cliff, you haven’t solved anything. You’ve just paid less to get worse traffic.
3. Target Problem or Solution Keywords
One of the simplest ways to lower CPC is to stop only targeting product keywords and include problem-based searches too.
These are searches where the user is describing what they need help with, rather than naming the product outright.
Example:
- “Cleansing facial wash” might cost £7+ per click
- “Best skincare routine for oily skin” might cost closer to £3
Why?
Because problem keywords tend to be less competitive. You’re catching people earlier in their journey, before they’ve narrowed down to a specific brand or product.
Yes, conversions might take longer. But CPC is lower, reach is broader, and you get in front of people before your competitors do.
This is especially useful for brands trying to grow awareness without watching budgets evaporate.
4. Diversify Your Campaign Types
If you rely on Search alone, you’re fighting for the most expensive clicks in the busiest auction.
So one way to lower average CPC across your account is to spread demand across different campaign types.
How to do it properly
Use a mix that fits your business model, for example Search supported by Shopping, Display, Demand Gen, Performance Max, or Video.
Different campaign types allow you to target different funnel stages, which does two helpful things:
- It reduces competition pressure on your Search campaigns
- It helps you reach users in more places, not just at the highest-cost point of intent
If done well, diversification lowers CPC and improves overall cost per acquisition because your account is not relying on the priciest traffic only.
Final Thoughts
Reducing CPC is not about chasing cheap clicks for the sake of it.
It’s about improving relevance, tightening structure, and letting data guide where spend should go.
If you want lower CPCs that still drive results:
- Improve your Quality Score
- Test broad match without letting it go feral
- Target problem and solution searches
- Diversify your campaign mix
Do those consistently and CPC starts behaving itself again. Not forever, because Google, but enough to keep your ads profitable.
If you want help applying this to your account, or want a second opinion before Google “optimises” your margins away, give us a shout.
