PPC CPC Increase after Website Speed Issues Were Addressed

[LindsayE]

We recently moved our hosting provider over from WPEngine to Site Ground. We increased our page speed scores from D/F to a B this past week. However, we noticed an increase in our PPC cost per click due to the website speed being slower... we cannot figure out why this would happen. Has anyone else experienced something similar? A PPC landing page we have is---> https://www.medicarefaq.com/medigap/plan-a/

[AdvisGroup]

Hi Lindsay!

Were there any other changes made, other than the site speed improvement?

[LindsayE]

Not yet, we plan to do more site clean up but so far we've only implemented the changes to increase our page speed score. We used GTMetrix, Google Page Speed Test, Pingdom, etc to made the changes suggested that were impacting our score the most.

[AdvisGroup]

The changes you made could be affecting the quality score of the landing page, did your quality score change at all? A decrease in quality score will result in a higher CPC. Is it one particular keyword that the CPC has increased for, or is it across the board? Also, what bidding strategy do you use?

[Alick300]

Hi,

There can be multiple reasons for that (CPC increases). First I would suggest you to checks historical quality score and if there is no change in QS then either a new competitor is trying to break into the niche or an old one has decided to raise bids in an effort to grab a larger market share.

I'm sharing a very old post on the same but it is still relevant @ https://www.en.advertisercommunity.com/t5/Performance-Optimization/Sudden-and-unexplained-increase-in-CPC-Any-insight/td-p/22765

Thanks

[LindsayE]

Thank you for your responses! The QS did not decrease. Our hosting support said we had a setting wrong on their end that they had to correct. It was causing the website to go down due to being overloaded. Not sure if that would impact our CPC or not... does CPC go up if your site is having short outages? Or was that just a coincidence?

I'm the SEO guru... the owner is the PPC guru.