Cost per action, or CPA – sometimes referred to as cost per acquisition – is a metric that measures how much your business pays in order to attain a conversion.
Generally, your CPA will be higher than your cost per click or CPC, because not everyone who clicks your ad will go on to complete your desired action, whether its making a purchase or filling out a form to become a lead.
Cost per action takes into account the number of ad clicks you need before someone converts – in other words, improving your conversion rate will lower you CPA.
How To lower your CPA in adwords
So what determines you CPA? Like most things PPC, your CPA is directly affected by your QS, Googles all-important metric based on the quality of your keywords, ads, and landing pages. In general, the higher you quality score, the lower your costs – in fact, for each point your score is above the average QS of 5, your CPA will drop about 16%.
Keeping your QS high and you CPA low an be a huge benefit to your PPC budget over time, giving you the opportunity to buy more exposure in the online advertising space and optimise the number of conversions that come from your ad spend.
how quality score affects cost per action
Its well known that AdWords QS affects your costs per click (CPC), but not everyone realises that Quality Score is every bit as important in determining your cost per conversion.
When your plot average CPA against impression-weighted Quality Score, you see a strong correlation: The higher the QS, the lower the CPA. In other words, optimising for QS and optimising for CPA are essentially the same thing.
what is cost per action bidding
CPA bidding is a method of paid advertising that allows you to tightly control your advertising spend. rather than paying Google for every time someone clicks on one of your ads, CPA bidding only requires you to pay for each conversion, a metric you define yourself when you set up each campaign. This action might be a sale, a lead, a download, or some other conversion you define. CPA advertising can help you avoid spending money on search terms that may not be directly driving business.