When it comes to running a pay per click advertising campaign, there are many elements an advertiser can change, tweak and optimise in order to improve the overall success rate of the campaign. For example, the text advert can be changed to an image advert or tweaked and optimised with call to actions to promote a click onto it. Another area that can be tweaked and changed is the CPC or cost per click. In this article, I will look into the different ways how the CPC you adopt can affect your campaign’s performance.

Before we get things rolling, it is important to understand just exactly what the CPC is all about, considering there are different terms when it comes to the CPC in PPC:

• The CPC is commonly referred to as the maximum CPC – the highest price you are willing to pay for one click on your advert.
• There is also the actual CPC which is the price you actually pay for each click (and is generally less than the maximum CPC).

The CPC is an important aspect to a campaign and can affect its performance for the following reasons.

CPC Controls Traffic Flow

The first point to make is that the CPC you choose will control the amount of traffic that reaches your landing page. This is because a higher CPC means you are more likely to outbid your competitors for ad placements. This means if you have more ad impressions, you are going to get more traffic if your click through rate (CTR) stays constant at the minimum. This is great to know since if you want short term traffic fast, you can easily increase the CPC to gain this even if it does cost you more.

CPC Controls Traffic Quality

It can be deemed more significant that the CPC you adopt will affect the quality of traffic you will be pushing through to your landing page. This is mainly because a high CPC suggests that the traffic is more valuable to the advertisers. For display adverts on publisher websites, the websites with the highest quality content will attract high quality traffic which will also raise the CPC of that webpage. Basically, the higher your CPC, the more contextual the traffic will be which will increase the chances of a conversion at the end of the PPC process.

CPC Controls Ad Location

For paid search results, the CPC you choose will also affect where your advert will be located. Ideally, every advertiser wants to be at the very top of paid search results. However, the reality is that it is a constant bidding war to get this spot because it is the most successful spot for paid search results. If you want top spot, you will have to increase your CPC. If you don’t do this, you should not be surprised to see your advert ranked #2 or #3 in paid search results which may affect its performance since web users are going to be more likely to read and react to the first/top paid search result advert than the #2 or #3.