Improve Your Quality Score
This is the big one, and almost every action that we discussed earlier can feed into the activity of improving your Quality Score in order to lower your CPA. In fact, your CPA is directly affected by your Quality Score. Google’s all-important metric based on the quality of your keywords, ads, and landing pages. In general, the higher your Quality Score, the lower your costs – in fact, for each point your score is above the average Quality Score of 5, your CPA will drop about 16%.
Keeping your Quality Score high and your CPA low can be a huge benefit to your PPC budget over time, giving you the opportunity to buy more exposure in the online advertising space and optimize the number of conversions that come from your ad spend.
Since your Quality Score directly impacts your cost per click, your CPA will likely move down in tune with Quality Score improvements. The higher your Quality Score, the lower the CPA. Optimizing for Quality Score and optimizing for CPA is basically the exact same thing.
There are a variety of strategies that can help you improve Quality Score, and we have some excellent resources available to you to help you pursue that activity. In general, you will be looking to ensure that your search-to-conversion funnel is as tightly aligned to the keywords that you are bidding on as possible.
When a prospect enters a search query, Google wants to see that the keywords that you are bidding on are highly relevant to the search, that your ad text includes those high volume/frequently searched keywords included in your ad group, and that your landing pages properly express your offer and include keywords that are strongly associated with the original search query. By optimizing this chain of events, you can incrementally improve your Quality Score and slowly lower your CPA as a result of the cost savings tied to Quality Score improvements.