When it comes to a PPC advertising, one element of a campaign that will impact the success of it comes with the cost per click (CPC) that you adopt. This impacts the position of your advert, quality of traffic, quantity of traffic, cost per acquisition, cost per conversion and many more statistics that are all vital to a successful campaign. There are benefits and cons to adopting a high CPC strategy as opposed to running a low CPC strategy (and vice verse). Here is a comparison to help you determine which is best for your PPC campaign.

High CPC Strategy

A high CPC strategy involves outbidding all of your competitors to get the number one spot on paid search.

Benefits

• Top of paid search results – The location that tends to get the best results, in terms of exposure and clicks, is the top paid search result.
• Consistency – If you are always guaranteed to be at the top of paid search results, you will find your campaign’s performance will be more consistent than a campaign where the search advert fluctuates between 1st and 4th positions.
• High quality traffic – With a high CPC strategy, it is more likely that you are going to obtain better quality traffic, such as from higher performing keywords.

Drawbacks

• Expensive – Let’s get the  main point out of the way. The limiting factor for most campaigns is a budget. High CPC strategies will eat through your budget very quickly, which does not make it very sustaining (this is okay if the ROI on your campaign is positive).
• Risky? If you are unsure about the type of traffic you want, and have not fully made your campaign contextual, it is very risky to spend so much on traffic you are unsure of the results you will obtain.
• ROI? As mentioned above, many campaigns are compared to how much profit they produce or return on investment (ROI). If your ROI is negative, this is basically stating that it is cheaper to not run your campaign and not obtain the extra conversions.

Low CPC Strategy

Benefits

• Cheap – With a low CPC strategy, it is easier to sustain than a high CPC campaign helping to make your budget last longer.
• More traffic – Since PPC works on a cost per click, you will gain more traffic than implementing a high CPC strategy.
• Why low CPC? – Low CPC strategies don’t necessarily mean you have targeted poor traffic. In actual fact, you may have found a niche keyword or have a better quality score, which means you don’t need to adopt a high CPC strategy.

Drawbacks

• Poor quality – If the keywords are not niche, the reason the CPC is low is because the traffic is not of high quality (unlikely to convert).
• ROI? The cost per click is not as important as the cost per conversion. You might actually find the cost per conversion is worse off with a low CPC strategies than a high CPC one.
• Unreliable traffic – With a low CPC strategy, you cannot predict well where your advert will be located. This makes it harder to sustain traffic using your PPC campaign, if at all.