Learn How to Recognize CPC Creep and What You Can Do About It
There are many things that can cause CPC to creep up. Once you understand whether you have a CPC creep issue, you can reverse the trend with some of these strategic changes.
There are many things that can cause CPC to creep up. Once you understand whether you have a CPC creep issue, you can reverse the trend with some of these strategic changes.
Over time we PPC managers make changes to our campaigns based on recent and longer date-range performance trends – what is converting best for me now? Keyword bids get bumped up to increase conversions. Competitors enter the market and bids are increased to maintain our strong ad position.
Whatever the cause, often CPC will slowly creep (and for those non-nerd folk out there, that green thing in the picture is a Minecraft “Creeper”) higher and higher over time. Quite the opposite of what we PPC pros are striving to achieve! So, how can you stem this tide of CPC creep? First of all, make sure you are reviewing data trends over long periods of time. Often we get blinded by looking at recent data – past seven days, month-to-date, past 30 days, etc., etc…
That’s great and is often an important part of the bid optimization process. However, what is happening with the big picture? Where are your keywords trending over the past six months? The past year? Looking at your data in this way will help put CPC trends (and other important KPIs) into perspective. Take the following graph for example. Over a six-month time period, average position remained flat while CPC rose by $3 on average. Looking at just one month or just a week’s worth of data wouldn’t show this drastic rise in CPC.
Once you understand whether or not you have a CPC creep issue, then you can settle in and prepare to apply strategic changes to reverse the trend.
CPC creep sucks. There’s no two ways about it. But it is your responsibility as a PPC manager to seek out and understand when this is happening and take action. Happy hunting and the CPCs be ever in your favor!