Cost per acquisition (or CPA) denotes to how much money is spent on advertisements and marketing to attain leads – people who lick on your website or take action on a call-to-action. In order to learn what the CPA is for your business, you need to use the CPA= cost/conversions formula.
When you reduce the CPA, you actually boost the ROI from advertising in a short period of time without incurring more cost of traffic acquisition. When you prioritize the decrease in attaining new customers, you can control the cost.
Many times, marketers will put their attention on sales or attain traffic before they optimize the cost. They start projects thinking about the ways they can make additional money but forgetting the cost optimization until they’ve wasted their vast resources.
If you reduce the CPA at the start, you don’t have to worry about controlling your costs and cane develop ways to boost your conversions. It’s easier to craft up ways to decrease the marketing and conversions costs before you actually get sales.
Since search marketing is seen as an effective method to attract the attention of a certain demographic, it’s never been more important to reduce your CPA.
15 Extremely Effective Ways To Decrease Your CPA
There are several things you can put into practice to decrease your acquisition costs within the PPC marketing campaign.
Optimize The Website’s Landing Page
The first page visitors are going to see after they click the ad is the landing page, and you need to make sure that the landing page is optimized so it’ll generate conversions. In order to find out how effective your landing page, do an A/B test that will look at its success rate.
The “Test A” landing page can be geared toward all traffic using the same generic page, regardless of what kind of ad you have running. “Test B” will use a targeted approach. Make sure to run both landing pages, but split the traffic amount 50/50 to see what kind of results you get. If you do this, you’ll get a better idea what landing page is getting more conversion rates and a lower CPA.
Use Online Video
Not too long ago, Adobe state that nearly 52 percent of marketing professionals around the world considered video to be the best content for a return on investment. Video search is regarded as less competitive than other kinds of searches. If you want to reduce your CPA, you should focus all your highly competitive search terms on YouTube.
Now, you can do this separate from the other search campaigns you have or do them in unison. YouTube searches often focus on keywords, gender, age group, location, target audience, etc.
Retargeting Methods
This method will let you reach out to folks who had visited your site before by presenting ads that are relevant to yours on other sites they visit in the Google Display Network. This lets you connect to potential leads while they’re looking at other sites – the ads will entice them to visit you once more. Perhaps even becoming a paying customer.
How does retargeting work? You add a piece of code known as a retargeting tag on your website. Any visitor to your site is tagged and added to the retargeting list.
Think of them as hot leads that you can lure back in with compelling offers. These methods are extremely profitable and can boost conversion rates and decrease the acquisition cost.
Use Retargeting Campaigns On Visitors Who Didn’t Complete The Shopping
Retargeting visitors that didn’t complete the shopping experience is a way to get them back. If they left something in the shopping cart, make sure you reach out to them. By retargeting them, they’re likely to come back and address the cart. If you can entice them to come back, the chances of them buying the item in their cart are higher.
Quit Targeting Areas That Don’t Generate Many Sales For A Moment
There are many situations in which the Pareto principle can be used. This is not an exception. Did you know that 80 percent of your sales will come from 20 percent of locations while the remainder 20 percent will be from 80 percent of locations?
The best thing you can do is focus your marketing efforts and budget on those locations that will lead to more sales and improve your ROI from advertising. Once you have more liquid revenue or you wind up with a bigger budget, then focus on those no-sales locations to see if you can increase the numbers.
Better The Quality Score
What is the quality score? It’s Google’s rating for your PPC ads and keywords quality and significance. It’s used to find out what the cost-per-click is and multiplied by your highest bid to learn what the ad rank is in the ad auction process.
After you’ve developed a tighter and relevant keyword group and better the overall user experience, the better the chance for more people to click on your ad. When this happens, you better your Quality Score, which leads to three things:
- Reduction in cost-per-conversion
- Reduction in costs-per-click
- Pricing discounts
Constantly Look Over The Search Terms Report For Negative Keywords
You always want to look over the search terms report to see if there are any irrelevant keywords. Which negative keywords don’t go along with your marketing objectives? Find those and get rid of them. If you’re just starting out in establishing an online presence, or you have a new brand, look over the reports more often.
The goal is to ensure your ads are not going after users who don’t need your company’s products/services.
Assess and Reassess The Ad Copy
Get a good look at what you’re currently using for ad copy. Is the message-correlating with your objectives? How well is it going with your campaigns? There may be some need to change up the CTA or redo the copy so you target the leads you should be targeting. Be sure you use action-like language in the message for a better impression. You want them to feel as if they need to act right now, or they’ll miss out.
Decrease Bids On Keywords
Carry out a Google Experiment on your currently used keywords. How does the ad rank? How it ranks will affect the conversion rates and clickthroughs. Use the results to see if there needs to be some adjustments and eliminate any keywords bids that don’t work for you. You’re wasting money if you continue using what’s not working.
Momentarily Quit Using Non-Converting Keywords
Now you need to completely assess your target cost per conversion along with the site’s conversion rates to see what keywords should be eliminated. How profitable are these keywords? Do keywords have any kind of acquisition or direct conversion to them? Bear in mind that they may have relevance down the road.
When you’re assessing the keywords, you need to find out what keywords are the best for you. Use that Search Term Report to find new keywords or phrases that relate to ones that currently work for you.
Have A Clear Objective When Optimizing
You may be tempted to optimize the website as soon as you’re able. Don’t do this without some kind of clear goal in mind. Random optimization is done when you tweak one or two things every so often. It’s also done when you react swiftly to something on the website. And, it tends to happen when you don’t look at the analytics results.
Yes, random optimization is easy. After all, you don’t have to plan for anything or ensure the objectives correlate with your optimization efforts.
But, here’s what you need to understand. Random optimization can hurt your business. And, the losses are more than just money wasted. It’s also overlooked chances to sales and wasted time.
You need to plan each stage in advance. You want to set daily, monthly, yearly goals and objectives for your company. When you do this, you reduce the chances of problems and effectively alleviate the risks.
It also provides you with a competitive edge to people who do “fly-by-the-night optimization”. With a clear plan in place, you’re not struggling at the worst possible time to come up with something that works.
Do What You Can To Boost Your Email List
Many people see email marketing as old school, but it’s a marketing approach that has worked and continues to work, garnering results. Besides that, it offers the highest ROI with the least cost-per-acquisition rates when compared to other high-tech marketing channels. If you don’t do email marketing, you could actually hinder your other marketing campaigns.
Be sure you attain information from website visitors, most especially their email address. The more people on your email list, the less money you’ll spend on renting ad spaces on various platforms – Facebook, Google, etc.
Once you’ve garnered a successful email listing, you need to use it. Nurture the list by offering valuable content to the subscribers. This will help in establishing a relationship with them and generate loyalty.
Streamline The Checkout Process
There is a 68 percent checkout abandonment rate among Internet shoppers. This is a rather high rate since the main reason people don’t carry out their purchase is due to the hidden charges associated with the buying process. Shoppers tend to be shocked by the extra charges they were not aware of at the start of their shopping.
You can turn that around by making them aware – from start to finish – how much something will cost. This also includes the shipping fees.
You should also be aware of the technical things – crashes, time-outs, screen freezing, etc. These will lead to a negative buyer experience where they may never come back to your site. Deal with these issues to reduce the impact they have. It also will help to reduce the cost per lead acquisition rate.
Quit Using Any Non-Profitable Paid Campaigns
Ask yourself if they are any running paid ads that are costing you more money than they are bringing in. If so, then stop using them for a time. If you have paid marketing campaigns that haven’t produce any sales in the last few months, quit using them. That is until you’ve come up with an explanation as to why they’re not leading to conversions.
After you realized what’s going on, tweak them until you get them optimized. If you want to start them up again, do so.
Streamline Ads On Mobile Devices
Better the mobile user’s ad experience by optimizing the ad – it’ll also lead to views and interactions. While an ad may be developed for a mobile device, it doesn’t mean it’s ready for it completely.
You can find out if your ad is mobile-friendly by looking at the conversion rates. Did the rates get better after the mobile ads were introduced? If they didn’t, you might need to streamline the ads to ensure they’re mobile-friendly. Boost your success rate by streamlining the user experience so that the ad will lead to a better buying experience through their smartphone or another device.
What You Should Remember?
It’s important you know that there’s no one solution to dealing with the acquisition cost reduction. While many of the above tips may work; some others may not. Each situation is different – every industry is different. Keep that in mind.
Don’t forget to take some time with the team to figure out the strategies that will work. Use the tips when applicable and monitor the project’s performance. Use the A/B testing tool when you can. Keep an eye on the project and use the information to better your paid advertising campaign. What strategies will work best for your business to decrease the CPA and streamline the costs?
With constant testing, investigating, observing and streamlining, you can increase your profits and reduce the acquisition costs. You want to use the tactics that will produce high-quality leads that are more effective than you’ve experienced before.
Please share your experience in the comments below how you improved your ROI from advertising on the internet.
