October 8, 2021
The Ideal QA Process in Digital Advertising
If you rely on PPC to drive a significant number of leads or revenue for your business, it often seems like you’re trapped in a devil’s bargain: the only way to drive more leads or revenue is to spend more on paid search, but then your CPA or ROI will sink to unprofitable levels.
Simply put, this is a false choice. There are many ways you can improve your lead or revenue performance without compromising your ROI or CPA goals.
Breaking into your piggy bank isn’t the only way to get more conversions. Photo via Pexels
Conversion Rate
Improving your conversion rate, or how well visitors convert when they arrive on your landing pages, should be a primary focus area, since even small increases in conversion rates can grow conversions without growing your budget.
If your paid search efforts are effectively driving your target audience to your site, then your conversion rate is limiting how much you can spend on each converter to stay within your CPA or ROI goal. Let’s say you drive 20,000 website clicks at a conversion rate of 4%, for a total of 800 conversions. If you increase the conversion rate by just 7.5%, from 4.0% to 4.3%, you would receive an additional 60 conversions per month. Extrapolated over a year, this equals 720 conversions, almost a whole extra month of conversions! You should not underestimate the potential of even small landing page improvements to drive conversion rate wins.
Bonus: This is especially important for mobile landing pages as a high percent of your overall traffic comes from mobile devices.
New Conversion Types
You should also explore whether different conversion actions can improve your visitor-to-lead or lead-to-customer conversion rates.
For lead-gen advertisers, a whitepaper featured on your landing page may drive a strong conversion rate, but a poor lead-to-customer rate. If that is the case, you should develop a short demo or trial. A lead that engages with a product-specific demo or trial is usually more qualified than a lead from a more generic whitepaper. Even though your visitor-to-lead rate may drop, you should see an increase in the quality of incoming leads.
An ecommerce business struggling to convert first-time site visitors should test a micro conversion, such as a newsletter sign-up. Visitors that don’t purchase on their first visit will at least leave an email address for additional nurturing and marketing.
On-Site Analytics
Can you optimize your remarketing to focus on the product category that gets the most return purchases? Will your category pages convert better as landing pages than specific product pages? Can you more effectively target audience segments that are most valuable to your business overall? What type of content is the most engaging and leads to higher time on site? Can you optimize your mobile conversion path based on mobile-specific behavior? Investing time in Google Analytics to answer these questions will give you strong insights on how to optimize your conversion rate.
New Image Ads
Unless your typical visitor converts on the first day of a visit, you should allocate some budget to closing traffic that you’ve already paid to bring to your site. Be mindful of ad fatigue. Bud, Weis, and Er effectively lured adults in the 90s into drinking Bud, but even they were replaced by two lizards once the public tired of their routine.
Creating new image materials requires resources and time, but can pay off with additional cheap conversions. Much like landing pages, finding an ad theme that is particularly engaging, and drives conversions, is an easy win.
It often feels like the only way to grow your PPC conversions is to spend more budget on paid search. But investing some time and effort into improving your conversion rates can reap big rewards without inflating your budget.
