For business owners and marketers alike, the Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) metric is a crucial indicator of how your campaign is performing. By definition, CPA is the amount it is costing you to generate a conversion. Once you have this information, the efficacy of a strategy can be analysed and, if needed, rethought.

This leads us to the question on every marketer’s lips… ‘how do you reduce the cost per acquisition?’

Optimising Campaign & Website

Typically, CPA is high when those seeing the ad are not interested in the product or service that is offered. In order to keep CPA down, it’s worth considering the ways in which settings can be optimised from the onset of a campaign.

A well-planned campaign is fundamental to lowering CPA and maximising ROI. Landing page optimisation, personalisation and a clearly identifiable target audience are among the many elements that should be considered.

Running Remarketing Campaigns

Additionally, conversion rates can be increased by running remarketing or retargeting campaigns. Focusing efforts on individuals who have already shown interest, but haven’t converted yet can help to lower the CPA of a campaign.

Remarketing campaigns can prove particularly effective at targeting users that have abandoned their shopping carts before check-out.

Location Specific Targeting

As we touched upon earlier, CPA is increased when ads are being seen by the wrong people. Utilising location-specific ads is an efficient method of targeting areas that have generated a high volume of sales in the past. In doing so, conversion rates will increase and CPA will fall.

Carefully built Google ad campaigns are one of the very best methods you have for generating leads. A well-thought-out campaign can generate high-quality leads from your website, but the real work begins when it comes to optimising and scaling for continued results.

The ever-changing landscape of digital marketing and pay-per-click (PPC) advertising means that a successful campaign needs to be flexible and adaptable to change. This could come in the form of adjustment of keywords, reestablishing audience targets, or subtly tweaking other elements.

Scaling Explained

In the most basic terms, scaling means increasing a campaign budget with the intention of driving more conversions. An advertiser can do this in a number of ways, be it by increasing the budget of existing campaigns, launching completely new and original campaigns on different platforms, or weighting the budget differently between parts of the business, promoting new services and products.

The overall goal is to determine which audiences, types of ad copy, and creative content produce the best results and generate the best return on investment (ROI) for a client. Much of this involves testing different target groups and ideas, to reveal ads and audiences which can then be enhanced progressively.

Components of Your Ad Campaign

Some of the key factors involved when establishing a Google Ad campaign include budget constraints, selected keywords, bidding strategies, targeting strategies, and performance metrics, to mention just a few. Tweaking these elements of your campaign can help you to optimise and scale successfully. Finding the right balance often involves fine-tuning what you have and improving a few variables, otherwise, you may risk ending up with an array of cluttered ad groups and campaigns which are hard to manage.

Gradual Budget Increases

Gradual steps and slight changes are just as important when considering the Google Ads interface, as campaigns are optimised through machine learning and sudden increases in the budget and other crucial changes can confuse artificial intelligence. A campaign which has not been given time to adjust and adapt to a budget increase will simply deplete the budget quickly, without the guarantee of increased conversions – in other words, it will become a futile endeavour.

The importance of gradual budget increases cannot be understated, and increasing a budget significantly at any one time can seriously jolt the campaign. You should instead slowly implement budget changes; for example, increasing the budget by 15% to 25% every 2 days.

Other Considerations

Scaling is, of course, not a one-size-fits-all process and variation between campaigns means that enlisting the help of digital marketing strategists is encouraged. The team at Bigg have the skills and expertise to know exactly when and how certain factors need to be altered for the best results.

By asking questions such as “Which platforms could be suitable for the client to achieve their new goals?” or “What does the existing conversion data tell us about potential new areas for growth?”, we will be able to determine the best course of action for scaling your campaign. This might involve making tough calls on whether there is sufficient demand for the product or service, and where an increase in budget will make a significant difference. Luckily, there are some useful tools that we can utilise to predict the demand for new products and services, such as Google Keyword Planner and Google Trends.

Scaling doesn’t have to be too difficult, though, as ad platforms themselves can sometimes give an indication of the budget needed to achieve desired results. For Google Ads users, the corresponding Google Performance Planner or Campaign Budget Simulator gives concrete predictions of what impact a certain budget increase would have on Impressions, clicks and conversions for each individual campaign.