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By Darren DeYoung
When your cost-per-click suddenly jumps, it doesn’t feel like a normal performance fluctuation. It feels like something broke.
You didn’t raise bids. You didn’t expand keywords. You didn’t approve reckless recommendations.
Yet clicks cost more, sometimes dramatically more.
This is where many advertisers panic and respond by increasing budgets or loosening efficiency controls. That reaction often makes the problem worse.
In Part 2 of this series, we focus on non-bid factors that directly influence CPC, specifically:
As part of this mission, they strive to provide an indelible customer experience which extends to those who choose to use their advertising platform. Google wants users who click on a Google Ad to have a great experience.
From Google’s perspective, the job of an ad is not to generate clicks, it’s to deliver users to pages that satisfy intent. When that experience breaks down, Google compensates by charging more to show your ads.
Landing page issues rarely announce themselves directly. Instead, advertisers often see:
Common causes include:
Even when ads continue to attract clicks, reduced post-click satisfaction lowers Google’s confidence, and CPC rises to maintain position.
Ad copy affects CPC through relevance signals, not persuasion alone.
When your messaging no longer aligns tightly with search intent, engagement weakens. Google reads that engagement drop as reduced relevance, even if conversions haven’t collapsed yet.
If your ads are cruising along, providing good exposure and leading to positive results, but all a sudden there is an abrupt change, you will likely wonder what happened.
What if another company that is competing for the same keywords just redesigned their website? Yes, their new site is trendy, modern, and attractive. But at the same time, your CPC skyrockets upward.
How could this happen if you didn’t do a thing? If this competitor didn’t adjust their final URLs for their ads and if they didn’t set up landing pages for those ads on their new site, they just debilitated their Google Ads campaign.
Their actions caused their Landing Page Experience to drop. This directly affects their Ad Rank while causing your CPC to increase.
The increase in Ad Rank may come with a higher CPC as your ads are now shown more prominently and in a higher position. Sometimes this increase in CPC is substantial (depending on the competing bids), while other times it may be minimal.
Regardless, it is a common scenario that may occur and be alarming if your CPC doubled from the previous day.
These changes, or those similar in nature, will have a significant impact on ad performance. The more substantial the change to ad copy text or landing page design will lead to greater changes in ad performance. Eventually this will catapult ads--either yours or those of your competition--up or down the ad position ranks.
Ensure users land on pages that directly answer their search intent. Avoid vague copy or generic messaging that forces visitors to hunt for clarity.
Make business details easy to find. Clear contact information, policies, and credibility signals reduce hesitation and improve post-click engagement.
Mobile traffic magnifies friction. Confusing layouts, intrusive pop-ups, or unclear calls to action quickly degrade experience scores.
Speed directly influences CPC. Slow pages lower satisfaction, reduce engagement, and force higher pricing to maintain visibility.
Test your site to see how it scores on mobile speed and get quick fixes to improve it.
Because your landing page plays a big part in turning clicks into customers, the user expects to end up on a page that is relevant to what they saw in the ad. If they don’t find what they expect, they are more likely to leave.
If the user searches for landscape supplies and they click on an ad that leads them to a webpage with lawn fertilizer, whoops! That is a poor user experience.
Landing page experience is one of the most controllable levers in paid search. Improving it not only stabilizes CPC but strengthens conversion performance at the same time.