What is CPC?

What is cost per click? Welcome to Legal Marketing 101. I'm Toby Rosen. Today, we are diving into a crucial aspect of legal marketing that often does actually get a lot of attention, and that's cost per click, or CPC for short. And if you've been in the marketing game for a little while already, you probably already have some concept of this concept, but there's always something new to learn or to refresh or get a little bit more detail on right. So let's dive in.

At its core, cost per click is a metric that is used to measure the effectiveness and efficiency of your online advertising campaigns, particularly in pay per click advertising. I've talked about this before. Whether you're using Google ads or Bing ads or social media platforms like Facebook or LinkedIn, understanding your CPC and what you're paying is really key to optimizing your marketing budget and your ROI, your return on investment. But how does CPC work? What really is this? And it's pretty straightforward. Basically, cpc represents the amount you pay each time someone clicks on your ad. Basically, imagine this as the price of admission for each visitor that your ad attracts to your website or landing page, and how much it actually costs to get them there. Now you might be wondering how is CPC actually determined, and that's a good question, because it's a little different on different platforms, and the truth is that it can vary pretty widely depending on a bunch of different factors for your particular industry, your target audience, your keyword competitiveness, your ad quality, bidding strategy there's a bunch of factors that go into determining your particular cost per click. Any competitive industries like the legal world, where keywords related to legal services can be pretty pricey, cpcs do tend to be higher. That's why it's really important to conduct thorough keyword research and work really hard on your bidding to ensure that you're getting the most bang for your buck here. And another thing to keep in mind is quality score. Google, for example, uses quality score to evaluate the relevance and the quality of your ads, your keywords and your landing pages. The higher your quality score, the lower your CPCs are going to be. So it pays off very literally, I might add, to create compelling ads and provide a seamless user experience on your landing pages and on your website.

But let's talk a little bit about budget and bidding strategies, because this is important to your CPC as well. When you're setting your budget for your PPC campaigns, you need to strike a balance between your desired reach and, obviously, your financial resources. You don't want to overspend and drain the budget you have too quickly, but you also don't want to be too conservative and miss out on valuable opportunities. And that's where bidding strategies come into play. Whether you opt for manual bidding or automated bidding or optimized for conversions, the goal is really just to find the sweet spot where you're bidding enough to compete effectively for the added placements that you need, but also still maintaining a healthy ROI. But it's not just about getting the clicks. It's about converting those clicks into leads and then into clients, and that's why tracking this CPC alongside other metrics like conversion rate, cost per acquisition, things we've talked about before that's why tracking this is so crucial for evaluating the overall performance of your campaigns. You need to know how much you're spending on the front end. But CPC is something we want to be constantly monitoring, so we can fine tune our efforts, so we can drive some better results and ultimately, all the way down that funnel, we want to be able to grow our practices.

But if you've seen CPC and you've been spending time on Google, there's probably another number that I want to talk about that you've seen maybe you've seen this floating around and that's CPM. It's actually really really similar to CPC, but I just wanted to do this episode to explain the differences, because the differences can be substantial. So CPM stands for cost per meal M-I-L-L-E, and that's actually a number. Cpm, that means cost per thousand impressions. I don't know why we've decided to go French with this one, but the advertising industry stuck with it. And unlike CPC, where we're getting charged based on the number of clicks our ads receive, so per click very literally, cpm is charging us for every thousand impressions that our ads generate, and an impression just quickly refers to each instance of your ad being displayed on a user's screen, whether it's mobile or desktop, and that's regardless of whether they interact with it or not. It's just whether it's displayed or not.

So you might be wondering why by now. Why would I choose CPM over CPC? It seems like it's just going to cost more money and I get no guarantee of clicks. But CPM can be really beneficial if your goal for your advertising is to increase brand awareness and visibility. Since you're paying for impressions rather than clicks, cpm can actually be a really cost-effective way to get your message in front of a much larger audience, especially if your ad creative, is compelling and eye-catching.

But there are a few caveats to consider. With CPM, you are essentially just paying for potential exposure, not the guaranteed results of a click, and just because your ad is being displayed does not in any way guarantee that users are going to take action or engage with the ad or with your business in any meaningful way. And so this brings us to a critical point of comparison between CPM and CPC the level of engagement and accountability. With CPC, you're only paying when users actively click on your ad and indicate a high level of interest and intent. This makes CPC a more performance-driven model for purchasing clicks, where you're essentially just paying for the results of showing your ad rather than just paying to show your ad. So, in other words, cpc options, at least in my opinion, are generally preferred when available, because you're paying only for the actual clicks and these have the potential to lead to conversions and measurable ROI. That's something I really like.

With CPM, though, you're paying for the exposure and, yes, that has value, but it doesn't have any guarantee of user interaction or conversion or return on investment. But that isn't to say that CPM doesn't have its place in certain marketing objectives, for example, campaigns that are focused on brand awareness and top of funnel objectives for these campaigns. Cpm can be a really valuable tool for reaching a wide audience and increasing visibility within your target market. But ultimately, the choice between CPC and CPM depends entirely on your specific advertising goals and your budget and your target audience. So you want to go through and evaluate the pros and cons of each model and understand how they align with your marketing objectives and then you'll be able to make informed decisions that'll help drive results for your practice.

While CPM can be really effective for increasing this brand exposure, I generally go for the CPC option. It's just more performance-driven and the ability to deliver measurable results is much better for me. But with any marketing strategy, as always, you need to test and then you need to optimize so that we can maximize our ROI and achieve the objectives we set out to achieve. That's it for Legal Marketing 101. Check out rosanadvertisingcom for more Thanks.