CPA, or cost-per-acquisition, refers to the amount of money it takes to gain a specified acquisition or new lead. CPA is also known as PPC (pay-per-acquisition).
A simple way to discover your CPA is to use this formula: CPA = cost/conversion.
More so than focusing on increasing sales and driving traffic to your site you should prioritize reducing your CPA, as doing so can boost your ROI without incurring additional expenses. Instead of strategizing how to optimize your sales numbers, first consider how you can use your energy and resources more effectively. This will save you time and money in the long-run.
Johanna Rivard of PureB2B: “Reducing CPA from the very beginning is akin to low-hanging fruit because it’s less difficult to start off controlling costs than to come up with ways to increase conversions. Overall, it’s better (and relatively easier) to think of ways to reduce marketing and conversions costs before the sales numbers start pouring in.”
One potential pitfall of reducing your CPA is that it can sometimes result in a decrease in your conversion volume. The goal, of course, is to have your cake and eat it too: a low CPA while maintaining solid conversion rates.
And in this article we are going to discuss a variety of best-practices you can employ to accomplish this.
4 Techniques to Lower Your CPA
Optimize Your Landing Page
The page that you drive traffic to can have a significant impact on your conversion rates. Your landing page serves as your visitors’ first real taste of what your company has to offer. Therefore, you need to make sure to test and optimize the landing page you select.
To do this, run a split-test between two landing pages: page A and page B.
Page A can be the page you’re currently using and page B can be a page that’s more highly targeted. Then, run a 50/50 traffic split between the two pages and see which one performs better.
Customize Your Ad Scheduling
Another way to reduce CPA is to track its performance by the hour. Daniel Friscia says, “For each campaign, you can run a report in the ‘Dimensions’ tab that will show you CPA performance by time of day, as well as [the] day of the week.”
To prevent your conversion volume from decreasing as a result of making too many cuts, however, Friscia suggests “testing different bid modifiers first.”
Leverage Regargeting Techniques
Retargeting, or remarking, techniques are especially beneficial to use with prospects who abandon their shopping carts; these people are essentially your hottest leads.
To run a retargeting campaign…
Retargeter.com: “You place a small, unobtrusive piece of code on your website (this code is sometimes referred to as a pixel). The code, or pixel, is unnoticeable to your site visitors and won’t affect your site’s performance. Every time a new visitor comes to your site, the code drops an anonymous browser cookie.
Later, when your cookied visitors browse the Web, the cookie will let your retargeting provider know when to serve ads, ensuring that your ads are served to only to people who have previously visited your site.”
Don’t Forget To Incorporate Video
According to Dave Lloyd of Adobe Systems, “51.9% of marketing professionals worldwide name video as the type of content with the best ROI.” Another advantage is that video searches tend to be less competitive than other types of searches.
Accordingly, while running your other campaigns, you can target your most competitive search terms to YouTube, whose searches “can also be highly targeted based on keywords, age group, gender, target audience, location, and other demographics,” says Johanna Rivard.
What do you think about the strategies detailed in this article? What are you doing to reduce your CPA?