Lowering CPC with Match Types and Negative Keywords

As the holidays approach, you may find that your cost per click (CPC) has begun to increase on some of your keywords – this is fairly common whenever there is increased competition for popular terms.

To help mitigate this seasonal increase in spend, there are a couple of strategies you can employ to help lower your CPC. Two of the most effective methods for lowering CPC are to bid across all match types as well as to include negative keywords.

Bidding Across Match Types

If you’re unsure of what the differences are between Exact, Phrase and Broad match types, I would recommend reading through Lauren Taft-McPhee’s post on the topic before continuing on as I am going to assume these concepts are familiar to you.

Bidding aggressively on Exact match only is a great strategy for keeping your traffic highly targeted and relevant.  If, however, you're finding that your impressions aren't as high as you'd like them to be, you should expand your bidding to Phrase match, Broad match, or both.  Doing so can help lower your overall average CPC as competitive pricing can sometimes be lower on different match types. 

Using Negative Keywords to Qualify Traffic

Let’s assume that you’re a travel agent whose campaign goals are to generate leads for the holiday travel season. Unless you’re running a branding campaign where maximum impressions are the goal to get your agency’s name out there wherever and whenever you can, it would be wise to incorporate some negative keywords into your campaign to keep your ads from appearing for holiday-related terms that have nothing to do with travel.

For example, if you’re bidding on the keyphrase “holiday travel”, you wouldn’t want your ad to generate clicks from someone looking for Billie Holiday CDs, or lyrics to “Holiday” by Madonna, or from someone trying to find out the name of the theme song from the movie, National Lampoon’s Vacation (“Holiday Road” by Fleetwood Mac).

One would think that your obviously travel-related ad copy would be enough to discourage unqualified traffic like the above examples, but you’d be surprised how many clicks you could generate from online window shoppers. To keep your ads from displaying for unrelated terms like these, you could add negative keywords like “Billie”, “Madonna”, “Fleetwood Mac”, “Lampoon” and “road”.

You’ll notice I didn’t include “National” or “Vacation”… both of these are travel-related keywords and could conceivably bring in relevant traffic. Neither may have anything to do with holiday travel, but hey… you’re a travel agent. Would you complain if you were able to book a vacation for a family of 5 heading to Disney as a result of someone who saw your “holiday travel” ad? Of course not!

Outside of using these two strategies to lower your CPC, you also might want to settle for a lower positioning during the holiday season as it can keep your costs better aligned to your budget, while still bringing in enough traffic to meet your goals. Good luck!

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