Building a successful marketing campaign requires reaching out to people in a variety of places. Through email, through social media and through search engines are just three of the most common venues for advertising, but there are many more. With Google specifically, there is a huge demand by brands for its AdWords solution because of its effectiveness and sheer audience. Any campaign via AdWords can be configured to spend as little or as much as you wish, but the overall cost of each click or engagement can be affected by a variety of factors. We’ll review what can affect the overall cost of AdWords campaigns below so that you can better optimize your campaigns.

Specific SERPs

Which SERPs, or search queries, lead to people seeing or clicking on your ads is a prime factor in how much your AdWords campaigns will cost. In most situations, you can specify which SERPs will primarily deliver results – but you’ll notice clicks and engagements coming from other SERPs as well. You can choose whether to exclude these specifically or target them as well, but the total number of SERPs delivering results to you can initially be flexible. This will obviously impact the cost of your overall campaign and depending on how many clicks and conversions you’re generating from each, you may decide to start or stop pinging URLs in numerous SERPs.

Click-through Rates

Your ads’ click-through rates definitely can and will impact how much you spend on each ad campaign. Effectively, the cost of your budget is based on this measurement – which takes the number of clicks and divides it by the number of impressions. Many brands use CTR specifically as one way of determining whether their ad campaigns are performing effectively from a cost standpoint. Ultimately, improving your CTR is a primary goal of any AdWords campaign, so be sure to use A/B testing and a variety of elements (such as different ad copy and images) to see what works best.  Not all images or ad copy will perform equally; this will allow you to optimize each campaign with the most successful elements possible.

Quality Score

Quality Scores are a somewhat complex measurement that determine where and how your ad will be displayed. It can also determine how much each click will cost you as an advertiser. Each keyword will have a Quality Score that is stacked up against your particular ad. Some of the measurements that are assessed include the relevance of the ad to the keyword, the estimated CTR and the quality of the landing page itself. You can take a look at what each Quality Score is in AdWords in order to make more effective judgement calls about your campaigns.

The number of clicks and conversions, which specific SERPs you’re targeting and the Quality Score of keywords can all impact how much each ad campaign costs. It’s not just a matter of pinging URLs at people for a flat rate. While you can have a specific ad budget, how many people see it (and how many people interact with it) is solely determined by a variety of factors mentioned above.