A Brief Overview of Campaigns Optimization
Keep your store busy during the Holiday
Summer is over and with fall here now and winter coming soon your main sale season is starting! Handle the sales of Halloween, Black Friday, Winter Holidays and many other opportunities to make more revenue than any other time of year. There’s barely a better way to expose yourself than with PPC or email campaigns. You’ve probably done plenty of campaigns so we don’t need to teach you “How to..” but in case you’d like to have a short recap in one place, it’s right here!
Why higher budget doesn’t bring you more money back?
As you know, campaigns themselves require a good deal of money to launch. The more you invest, the more you get back, they say. Not always! Proper tactics are what provide your success. If you invest a stack of money into the wrong elements, you will have a bigger loss. Learn smart tricks on how to make the most of less money.
What are the “correct elements”?
The key to successful campaign is A/B testing. Specifically, determining the elements that work best and investing into them to get the most out of your marketing initiatives. Real-time data gives you quick feedback so you can improve your campaigns on the go. Of course, this is only if you have enough response from your visitors. Otherwise, it takes some time to get some information you can work with.
In terms of planning campaigns for whole the year, it’s better to watch historical data. Compare your sales and conversions with the previous season and the previous year. Find the common trends that are likely to repeat. Make irrestistible offers supported with great content and prepare your channels for high traffic!
Learn how to read your visitors’ minds
Before we summarize the essential elements worth testing, read a few tips how to find the inspiration directly from your visitors.
React fast according to real-time data
Google Analytics tracks real-time data since they launched it in 2011, and recently started doing this with Facebook and Twitter as well. Now you can immediately see what’s happening on your site. Watch your traffic sources and currently visited pages. It’s great to see the number of actual visitors, where they come from and what pages they browse. But honestly, do you know how to deal with such data? Can you define which of your actions drove traffic to your site and what actions you are going to take next? Find the situations when real-time data help you react fast and properly. Keep your visitors engaged and make them convert.
Traffic sources
Real-time data allows you to see the sources and countries from which your visitors come to your website and the device they use. For overall evaluation it is better to watch the visits in each dashboard every other day. Real-time data helps you if you operate with a lower budget. The traffic may increase from a source you didn’t expect so you put just a little amount of money there. Keep an eye on your investments and don’t lose potential sales.
E.g. you run campaigns across sources you use, let’s say Facebook, PPC banners and an email campaign. You notice your Facebook posts work really well as you have many visits from this source. Thanks to this real-time information you can increase your budget and keep the traffic flowing.
Visits on page
This is a splendid source for your inspiration. Tracking the visitors’ journey can help you see both the successes of your conversion goals and customers’ interest. If you’re creating a newsletter, you can make its content based on most viewed products. Send an email to your customers and recommend the products. Those who visited the page recently might get persuaded to finish the order.
A special value brings you combining these sources of information together. Create an ad with attractive content and advertise it on the channels where you notice the highest traffic. Using Facebook or Google Adwords you can also choose if the ad should be displayed more for mobile or desktop.
Ask your visitors what they like — keep testing!
Successful campaigns are the ones that brings you the most conversions. A conversion does not necessarily mean making the purchase. It’s every action you want your visitors to complete. This is actually the first step of successful optimization of your campaigns. Set the conversion goals you want to achieve and adapt the rest of the components to them. Set quantifiable goals, so that you can track the success of each campaign.
What metrics are worth tracking?
These three indicators help you evaluate the performance of your campaigns or its variables.
- Impressions — the number of times your ad is displayed.
- Click through rate (CTR) — the ratio showing how often people who see your ad click it — clicks / impressions. E.g. if your ad is displayed 1000 times and 5 people click it, your CTR is 0,5%.
- Conversions — the number of times users complete the desired action.The final number shows your success.
What elements are crucial for successful testing?
There is not a clear answer for this. Each of the elements serves a different purpose. If you want to put together the best pieces, never test more than one of them at the same time, but rather test them separately. If you were to test both the CTA button and body copy at once, and your desired action is getting visitors’ email address, it would be difficult to recognize what variables caused the success. One thing is for sure. When optimizing your campaign, your goal is to find the truth. It may happen that the results you get won’t be according to your taste, but you should respect your prospects. Give them a chance to help you create the best campaign.
If you’ve never done an A/B test before, don’t worry. There are plenty of testing tools that do most of the work instead for you. Just have fun and optimize your campaigns to the best version.
The purpose of A/B testing is crystal clear from its name — you test variation A and variation B to find the best option for your ad, website, campaign, whatever. How long should you test each of the variations and what’s the line when the test is considered as successful and finished? This number is called confidence level and it’s a parameter set as 95%. It makes you 95% sure that given change is a good step for you. There is a whole alchemy behind this number but you don’t need to know it by heart.
When doing A/B testing, there is a whole list of elements that should be tested:
- title
- body copy and images
- keywords
Title — the first chance to succeed or fail
A good title is the first indicator of your possible success. So how to create such headline? Few SEO tips can help here.
It should be short , clear and appealing. The way how to accomplish this is easy. Just think about how would you explain to your friend what is the article about in 6 words. Include your target keyword to make it relevant as for user as for search engines. Sometimes the title itself is the answer on the visitors’ inquiry : “Travel Japan with the backpack”.
Real-time analytics show you immediately the amount of impressions and article/post reads and engagement. You can play with it and make a few changes to see which headline worked the best.
Body copy — find inspiration in real-time analytics
What to write about to interest your audience? Find out their preferences in your data. You can simply watch their behavior on your site.
- Which sites do they browse the most and the longest? Are they interested in content or lost?
- Do they read your blog?
- What products do they like?
- Do they share your content?
Watch also the pages they leave very fast or don’t even visit. Consider changing content or removing these sites from your web. Sometimes just little changes can help. Test different copy layout, color schemes or images.
Benefit from bounce rate!
Nobody’s happy when Google Analytics shows a website abandonment rate over 60%. It’s no reason to get stressed. It’s the moment when you should get the most out of the situation. Once someone visits your website — and allows cookies — add him to your retargeting list. You can try to reach him again. Maybe you’ll find him in a situation where he will need you. Expose your banners and ads around the web.
More than (key)words
Have you heard about negative keywords? Its setting on Google Adwords is as important as your main keywords themselves, especially in terms of saving your budget. Negative keywords are those general ones not relevant to your business. Clicking on them can significantly cut your money without any value for you. You will end up paying for clicks from people not interested in your products. For example, if you sell baseball cleats and not football cleats, set “football” as a negative keyword in your campaign. How can you identify the negative keywords? Search the word ”cleats” and see the list of answers Google gives you as relevant. Choose those you don’t want to be searched for and set them as negative keywords.
SUMMARY
Create your campaigns for especially for your business. Set goals for your campaigns and define what you want to achieve with each conversion. You can get inspired by the best practices but should mainly rely on the data generated by your real visitors. Data analytics is not rocket science. It is definitey not in eCommerce — one of the fastest growing fields of technology. Find the best analytics tool that allows you to track all your real-time and historical data in one place and make your work easier. Keep testing, find the best versions of your ads and beat your competition in this year’s holiday sale season!
