Ditch Manual Targeting: Cut Your Conversion Costs with Automation
There’s no doubt about it, automation has thrown a spanner in the works in recent years. As the importance of effective marketing increased, in came the marketing agencies. For a while, they were the kings and queens of the industry and were able to help millions of businesses to achieve their online strategies and goals. Now, with autonomous solutions, their reign may just come to an end.
The Problem for Agencies?
With the introduction of automated systems, agencies are now considered the less efficient solution. Automated tools and platforms are not only smarter and quicker, but they’re also less expensive as part of a marketing strategy. Now, hands-on-keyboards agencies struggle to compete.
As a business, you’re able to boost results and increase media spend. However, it also means that you can drop the agency and use this money for more media dollars. Again, this leads to even more results and agencies are left looking in from the outside.
Of course, this is a problem for agencies, but they’re also caught in a catch-22 situation. For those businesses who are sticking with the help of agencies, they’re pushing for a more efficient service. As a result, more agencies are investing in automated bid platforms, clever algorithms, dynamic targeting, and all the things they were doing just a couple of years ago. Just to stay competitive, these agencies are investing in the very technologies that may eventually remove them from their jobs.
Especially for performance digital agencies, they have made careers from helping businesses to target the right audience, use the right keywords, test landing pages, and similar tasks. As time goes on, these are all tasks that are automated for businesses.
Unfortunately, agencies aren’t receiving much help either. At the beginning of the year, Google actively sent an email out to small businesses. Essentially, they told these advertisers ‘we’ll focus on your campaigns, so you can focus on your business’. Sound familiar? This is the same message agencies were spreading many years ago. Now, Google is encouraging small businesses to leave agencies and instead focus on Google’s automated platforms for improved results.
Why Autonomous Solutions are Pivotal
As a business, you need to choose solutions that work for you and your industry. As competitors move towards automated solutions for marketing and reaching the right audience, you can’t afford to be left behind. Even with simple things like finding keywords, you need to do this as efficiently as possible…and automation is the best solution right now.
When we launch campaigns, direction is a difficult part to get right. With some of the latest analytics platforms, they can make recommendations based on historical data (some even make predictions for future trends). With little effort, we have suggestions of how to alter a campaign, something previously done by an agency.
Sticking with the keywords example, there are plenty of keyword research tools on the internet. After entering a root keyword, these platforms will generate a long list of similar keywords you might think about targeting. There needs to be a manual review just to ensure you’re on the right track, but the autonomous algorithms do most of the work.
With these platforms taking a huge burden from your shoulders, you not only keep up with (and hopefully surpass) the competition, but you save money and resources. While the technology does its thing with keywords and dynamic targeting, you’re free to spend your time elsewhere.
Reducing Your Cost per Conversion
Now we understand the importance of automation and how it can help businesses, let’s focus on one of the more critical metrics; cost per conversion. As the name suggests, this is all about how much money we spend just to get one conversion. Ideally, this figure is low because we want to spend as little as possible generating conversions.
After working out your cost per conversion, you need to compare against average sale prices and the like. If you’re paying $20 for a conversion and the average spend is $17, you’re actually making a loss on the campaign. If each conversion costs $20 and you’re selling high-ticket items, this suddenly doesn’t look too bad.
Below, we’ve listed five ways to reduce your cost per conversion while integrating and working with automation tools!
1. Hold the Poor-Performing Keywords
When working with keywords, one of the best things you can do is continually review their performance. Rather than setting up campaigns and then ignoring performance (and wasting your budget), check which keywords are contributing to your goals and which aren’t doing so much.
Firstly, we’ll deal with those that aren’t performing. We recommend looking at the clicks the keywords are generating in relation to conversions. Just because a keyword has only led to six conversions, don’t assume it isn’t working; it may have returned six conversions from 12 clicks and have a conversion rate of 50%. Even though the clicks and conversions are low, it’s still a valuable keyword.
If another keyword has generated thousands of clicks and only has six conversions, this is when you pull out because it’s harming your campaign.
2. Invest in Performing Keywords
Now the poor-performing keywords are gone, it’s time to focus on those that are doing well. Since you’ve made room, you can also consider how customers are finding your service and investing more in long-tail keywords. Just like anything in business, these first two tips are about separating the wheat from the chaff. Remove what’s not working, build on what is working, and keep making efficiency improvements.
3. Assess Negative Keywords
If you’ve ever seen this phrase before, it essentially describes keywords that are stopping you from reaching out to those with no interest in your brand. Although it may sound like something you want to avoid, every PPC campaign needs negative keywords so you don’t waste your time on people who simply won’t convert.
How does this work? Well, e-commerce stores concentrating on women’s shoes will see improvements in cost per conversion once they’ve excluded searches for men’s shoes. Without these negative keywords, there’s a chance of your products showing to those looking for men’s and children’s shoes. Of course, this is nothing but a drain on your budget and it will increase the cost per conversion.
4. Consider Timing
We know it’s important to show to the right audience, but we shouldn’t forget to consider the best times too. If you’re currently reaching out at all hours of the day, you’ll find some success but won’t be utilizing your campaign properly. With the brilliant analytics on the tools and platforms we use today, it’s possible to break down an average day to find out when conversions are more prominent.
During this analysis, look for the best periods and turn off your ads during the quieter times. Especially for those with seasonal products, you might just have an opportunity to adjust campaigns from one month to the next. Why continue advertising shorts and bikinis in the middle of winter when you can run your campaigns only when people need them?
5. Continually Improve Landing Pages
As our fifth tip for boosting your cost per conversion metric, you need to always think about what you can do with landing pages; don’t just settle when you could do better. You could have the world’s most efficient ad, but this all comes to nothing if your landing pages aren’t up to scratch. Rather than sending clicks to a random page, they should go to a landing page that continues their experience seamlessly.
For example, we recommend either a category or product page for e-commerce websites. For the B2B market, the landing page should continue informing the visitor about your brand and services. In addition to information, it should have a contact form; wherever possible, always make it easy for visitors to leave their contact information.
We should also note that having a landing page that strays away from your message, or even offers a different design, can be just as bad as not having a dedicated landing page in the first place. Make sure the landing page is a smooth transition from the ad; consumers should feel as though they’re continuing their experience, not visiting a completely different business.
Conclusion
With dynamic targeting and autonomous solutions, it’s possible to reach out to the right audience and in the right way. Today, we’ve learned more about the struggle for agencies, why cost per conversion is an important metric, and how you can minimize this figure moving forward.
If you’ve seen businesses talk about how automation transformed their operations, this is exactly why. If you want to compete and become more efficient this year, you know what you have to do!
Bonus! Marketing Tools:
2. Bilbi AI: Daily Marketing Campaign Insights
