Quality Score & Paid Acquisition Economics
Why a $50 click can be cheap, and the three moves that cut cost per customer.
Price is meaningless without customer value
A click costs what advertisers are willing to pay, which reflects what a customer is worth to them. The only relevant question is your maximum affordable cost per click: gross-margin customer value multiplied by your click-to-lead rate and your lead-to-customer rate. Against that number, an expensive keyword is frequently cheap and a cheap one is frequently ruinous.
Quality score is a discount on relevance
Platforms rank ads on a combination of bid and expected relevance, which means a better ad and a better landing page literally reduce what you pay for the same position. Improving the page is usually cheaper and more durable than raising the bid.
Negatives before bids
On expensive terms, a single week of irrelevant broad-match traffic can cost more than a month of waste on cheap keywords. Tight match types and an aggressive negative list is the highest-return action available on any high-cost account, and it requires no budget at all.
Bid to acquisition cost, not click price
Staring at the click price is the wrong altitude. Setting a target cost per acquisition derived from customer value lets automated bidding pay a lot for the click that converts and skip the one that will not. It needs conversion volume to work, so seeding it with data comes first.
The funnel beats the auction
Answer rate, response time, landing page clarity and close rate all multiply the value of every click already bought. Fixing them costs nothing per click and improves every future one. Scaling spend on a broken funnel simply loses money faster.
Common questions
Why is business-to-business advertising so expensive?
Contract values are high and audiences are precisely targetable. Whether it is expensive depends entirely on your close rate and contract size.
Should I cut budget if acquisition cost is too high?
Fix conversion first. Budget multiplies whatever your economics already are, in either direction.