Why the lowest CPC is not the best campaign KPI
Lately, I’ve been chatting with a befriended marketer about performance campaigns. Soon our conversation came to platforms and setups that have been proving successful to each of us. He was proudly mentioning that he was able to drive an all-time low CPC of below 2 cents for one of his Google campaigns. As he said that he had his campaign objective in the consideration stage of the marketing funnel, I got quite curious.
Care about 2 KPIs at least
I asked him if he would be fine if I have a quick look at his results, and as we are from different industries and trust each other from a previous collaboration, he agreed. Though the targeting being a bit broad, the campaign setup looked fine to me at first sight. Now, here’s the thing: in the consideration stage, I care most about 2 KPIs: clicks and engagement. The latter was hard to judge from the naked setup, so we looked at the analytics together. Fortunately, he had set up proper click tracking links. I used a custom view to filter for clicks from his campaign, and it instantly revealed the issue with the low CPC: the campaign drove 92% new users to the landing page. Good! But the bounce rate was at a devastating 94% with an average session duration of 5 seconds and a visit depth of 1.08 pages.
The landing page contained a well-made product video, clear conversion points, links to go deeper, and everything else you’d expect from a proper campaign landing page. But the sheer numbers showed that people were not even watching the video, let alone seriously considering looking for more information.
You may think that this is anecdotal, but I see these patterns several times: be it with app marketing, where the focus is set on a super-low CPI while not looking at the in-app activity and retention of their cohort. Or with brand campaigns that have vast reach in the millions but no measurement of the audience quality, viewability, and awareness uplift in the primary audience.
I’m not saying that you shouldn’t trust a good CPC, but don’t look at it isolated. You’ll be in a much safer spot if you:
Go surgical in your targeting, even if it’s more work
- Keep track of at least 2 KPIs that matter the most for your funnel stage
- Analyze beyond the campaign tool’s report with attribution tools, website- or in-product analytics
- Compare the results against the results from previous campaigns, especially if they didn’t work out as planned
- Keep optimizing: don’t get blindsided by strong results in the first days and then fall in the set-and-forget-trap
