How much impact would a £0.05 rise in cost per click have on your paid media performance? This small increase may seem negligible, but when operating at scale with large budgets (£5k+ per month), the impact that these small increases can have on clicks, conversions and the return on your advertising spend soon becomes costly.
Most businesses typically respond to these situations by changing variables such as targeting, ad copy, bid strategies etc., but often the most overlooked part of the equation is what happens after somebody clicks on your ads. Well-crafted ads with strong keyword relevancy still result in all users seeing the same generic landing page as everyone else – what extra push are you giving the user to turn their click into a conversion?
Improving the conversion rate of your existing paid media traffic can be a more valuable avenue than trying to manually fight against rising costs. Paid advertising platforms are becoming increasingly more competitive and therefore expensive, whilst seemingly attempting to take more control away from the user in favour of a streamlined experience.
Read more on our blog 'Are Advertising Platforms Making Your Ads Bland?'.
Your budget has remained the same, your conversions have dropped, and you notice that your cost-per-click has risen – how would you combat this? Throwing more budget into the account may help improve conversion volume, but your cost per acquisition isn’t likely to improve. Instead, if you start treating your landing page conversion rate as a paid media metric rather than just a website performance metric, you can begin attempting to offset increasing costs without raising your budgets.
A landing page conversion rate improvement of ~1% can result in large improvements to your operational efficiency, at identical budgets. Let’s take the following example:
Now, with nothing changing except from a slightly improved landing page conversion rate:
The main takeaway from this example is not that you could 2x your conversion volume, but to highlight how a slight shift in conversion rate metrics can dramatically change the performance of a high-spend advertising account. This highlights exactly why conversion rate optimisation should be treated as a key metric for paid media activity.
Paid media specialists are already spending a considerable amount of time improving keyword relevancy, audience building, campaign structures, ad copy, etc – these are all important aspects of maintaining a successful advertising account which utilises best practices, and should be continued.
However, these optimisations are often let down by the landing page experience, where every click is treated identically. A user may have clicked an ad you setup within an ad-group containing keywords related to a specific service or location, but this context is then lost post-click. This alters the mindset of the user, who is then left questioning whether the message conveyed in the ad matches what is shown on your landing page. In short, landing page personalisation is designed to supplement an already well-managed paid media account, rather than to replace your existing efforts.
Personalisation doesn’t have to mean spending resources on the creation of multiple unique pages on your website. Instead, it entails changing specific parts of your landing page experience in relation to what you may already know about each visitor.
Let’s cover an example:
User A landed on your site after clicking an ad which was nested within a “How To” ad group focused on research-based keywords. User B reached the same page of your site, but by clicking an ad that was sat within a “Book a Demo” ad group. Both users are landing on the same page, but we know that their intent is completely different based upon how they reached your site – the referring Google Ads ad-group.
User A sees a page with an explainer video, some social proof/reviews, and a CTA to download a free resource. This is matching the user’s initial intent behind clicking your ad, providing them with information whilst also establishing yourself as an authority in this space.
We know that user B is a warmer lead who is likely already well informed and is looking to proactively book a demo for your services. User B therefore lands on the same page, but instead they are met with a Book a Demo form shown to them above-the-fold, some text to convey what they can expect from the demo alongside your USPs, and some logos of some of your previous clients to generate trust.
The overall core page structure or content does not need to dramatically change with personalisation, it may just be a case of moving some elements higher up, changing some wording/imagery, or adapting a CTA. The goal is to just create a more relevant experience to the user after clicking your ads. Website personalisation is a single piece to the puzzle of personalisation in marketing, but it becomes increasingly more valuable as larger monthly budgets come into play.
You may be reading this thinking that implementing personalisation to this degree seems overly complicated, and historically this may have been true, but this no longer needs to be seen as a complete digital transformation to implement. In fact, for many businesses, the data for this personalisation already exists within your CRM, or connections between your CRM and paid media accounts can facilitate this.
HubSpot Content Hub allows you to utilise CRM information and predefined rules to show different content to different audiences, known as Smart Content. Smart Content rules can be created around categories such as:
Smart Content is all actioned within the HubSpot interface, meaning that once the framework is in place, changes can be made without requiring developer input each time. This not only makes personalisation more accessible, but also allows for on-the-fly changes and testing without having to worry about racking up large developer bills.
Every post-click improvement that can be made to your paid media activity will put your budget to work more effectively - improved performance does not have to mean paying Google/Microsoft/Meta/etc. more money. To receive a 10% uplift in conversion volume, you may contemplate a 10% increase in spend, but budget:performance scaling is not linear, so instead consider how increasing your on-site conversion rate would increase the output of the budget you were already going to be spending.
Before you next increase your paid media budget, ask yourself the question: “Would improving the return on my current budget yield more efficient results?”. Using our previous examples, an additional £5k/month may net you 20 more leads, but an improvement to your landing page conversion rates could provide the same outcome without any further budget increases.
If you are working hard and paying a premium to attract specific users to your site, it makes sense to cater their landing page experience to their individual needs.
To summarise, outside of traditional optimisation methods, improving your paid media performance does not always require you to raise budgets. Take a look at where your current paid traffic is landing today and identify where CRM information could be used to improve upon the user experience.
If you already have meaningful user data within your CRM, but your website delivers the same experience to each visitor, then explore how our website personalisation approach can help you get more value out of your current paid media spend.
If you already have meaningful user data within your CRM, but your website delivers the same experience to each visitor, then explore how our website personalisation approach can help you get more value out of your current paid media spend.