As a digital marketer, one of the most common projects at hand which is forever ongoing is identifying creative methods to reduce your cost-per-lead through your paid search marketing channels. At times you may feel that you are caught at a cross roads and none of the strategies you are implementing are actually reducing your cost-per-lead. So what next?
Well, from years of experience, I can say that the most effective strategy that I have implemented is the ability to segment my data and attack each segment as a micro project within itself. Below I will run you through some my methods of how to segment your data and effectively reduce the cost-per-lead of your account.
Keyword Review & Culling
A regular keyword review and culling is often one of the most effective methods to help minimise budget wastage and reduce your cost per lead. I find the most significant timeframes to conduct a keyword review is first over a 1 month, then 3 months and following that 6 months. The strategy you want to take here is to export search query reports over these time periods for each of your campaigns and carefully analyse the data. Once you have your data export, apply some simple excel or Google Sheet filters to your columns and sort by the highest cost and lowest conversion rate or highest cost and highest cost-per-lead columns.
You will instantly gain a clear picture of what search terms are working for you and what isn’t. I would suggest filtering anything that is spending significant budget but isn’t generating any leads and adding those search terms to your negative keyword list. If you conduct this particular strategy over the time periods mentioned above, you will not only reduce your budget wastage but allow more of your budget to flow onto new or higher converting terms.
Ads Review & Optimisation
Very much like your keyword review & culling strategy, reviewing your creative and ad performance is a crucial step in maintaining a low cost-per-lead. Run a simple ad report and review which ads are not performing well and what ads are generating significant leads at a lower cost per lead. Remember, when you review ad performance you are not just looking at the ad that is performing the best from a lead stand point but also from an engagement stand point. To review engagement you should look at your ad CTR and ad relevance metrics.
Once you have run these reports and gathered some of data, it will be very clear which ads are performing and which ads aren’t. However you will find that there will always be a number of ads where you require some extra data to make the right decision. Lucky for you, if you have correctly linked your Google Ads platform to Google analytics you will be able to generate some custom reports in Google Analytics which can give you a range of behavioural metrics for those particular ads. Some important metrics to look at include bounce rate, time on page & average sessions per user. There are many more metrics you can view here, but these 3 would be a great start and a good indicator.
From all of this performance & behavioural data that you have learnt about your current ad creatives, you will now be equipped to make the right data driven decisions to optimise your current ads and also creative new ad variants from creatives that are performing particularly well.
Review Smart Bidding
Let’s talk smart bidding, we are currently in 2019. If you are still using manual bidding strategies, please stop now! Google has invested significantly and worked to shape the Google Ads platform with smart bidding at the forefront. If you are still utilising manual bidding strategies, you are missing out on so much already. The Google AI and machine learning platforms can make hundreds, if not thousands of optimisations to your campaigns daily to achieve the result that you are looking for. The amount of optimisation work machine learning algorithms will conduct on daily basis is far more than a PPC analyst can do in any one day. To start some of the post popular smart bidding strategies include CPA or cost per acquisition, maximise conversions & maximise clicks. If you are already on one of these strategies, then you are on the right track to hitting your account goals. I find that the most effective method to get the most out of these strategies is to create campaign experiments and split the percentage of traffic between two strategies. A common setup I would usually go for here would be 50% to CPA and 50% to maximum clicks or 50% to CPA and 50% to maximum conversions. Once you identify which strategy works better, you can make the switch and implement that experiment as a permanent bidding strategy on your campaign. An important note to remember here is that these strategies take time to completely learn and make the right adjustments to get you the best performance. The sweet spot for me has been to give them around 2-4 weeks before choosing a permanent strategy to run with.
Split Test, Split Test, Split Test
Split testing is an extremely important component in my strategy to help reduce my cost-per-lead. While AI is applying an infinite amount of campaign optimisations daily, it’s important the you keep the evolving the account through new keywords, ads, extensions & offers. A nice technique I like to use here is utilising my auction insights report and extracting a list of my closest competitors. After you have obtained that list, you can run them in any ad research tool like SEMrush to find out what kind of creatives and keywords they are bidding on. Learn from this data and apply what you might think works best, but ensure it’s always to suit your business. After you are generating new assets to split test in your account, it’s simply a rinse and repeat process with the optimisation techniques I discussed above.
Landing page review & conversion rate optimisation
Let’s move away from the the Google Ads platform for a moment and think landing pages. After you have exhausted all your possible avenues through Google Ads, it’s time to review your landing page and learn if its actually effective and suitable for what your amplifying on Google. A great way to start is to review your standard behavioural metrics in Google Analytics to try and identify if users are actually having a pleasant browsing experience on your landing and are finding what they are after. For example, if you are finding the majority of users from one particular campaign or ad group are dropping within the first 3 seconds, then I would suggest that you have a content relevance issue and the journey from keyword to ad creative to landing page isn’t optimal. To take it one step further, I would you should take the time to look into heat mapping software which can analyse user sessions and generate heat maps of there behaviour. Most of these solutions also come with session recording out of the box so you can watch and analyse user session videos and see there behaviour on your landing page first hand.
Analyse your market
From everything mentioned above, analysing your market can be one of the most effective methods in working out your account highs and lows. Google trends (https://trends.google.com) will help greatly here. Once you have fed your search term/topics & target location, it will allow you to view historic trends for your particular industry and make data driven decisions about your market and overall digital marketing strategy. It’s not uncommon that many businesses and industries are seasonal, for example if you happen to manage a travel agency, you assume that around the holiday period will be your busiest period for bookings – so why not solidify that assumption with data and allow extra budget for these periods and then re-adjust your strategy for off season periods.
The Wrap Up
The above 6 strategies are just a start to help you reduce your account cost-per-lead. Over the course of the year I will dive into each in more detail and talk tools and specific implementation strategies. I hope you enjoyed this guide and if you have any questions or would like make any additions, feel free to comment below.