Cost Per Acquisition: Optimising your campaign for Search Engine Marketing

I’ve noted below 5 tips which I found useful while working closely on clients over the years who are looking to achieve tight CPA targets.

1.  Pause keywords with high cost and no conversions – These keywords are great to have around if you’re chasing a traffic target, but a big no-no for CPA targets

2. Find high converting keywords and add similar long tail keywords – The longer tail keywords will usually have lower traffic numbers and rock bottom CPC’s ($0.05 – $0.15)…If these convert then your CPA target will look a lot easier to achieve

3. Run a Search Query Report (in AdWords) - This will help find keywords which can be added as negatives and also give great idea’s for long tail keywords

4. Change Campaign Budgets - You can optimize all you want, but if you’re best converting keywords are in a campaign with a small budget which expires early in the day then the account performance will be naturally affected. To counter this, shift all your converting keywords into a seperate campaign. Remember it’s still important to group your converting keywords to maintain quality score.

5. Check Landing Page - Review the landing page and make sure you’ve chosen the best landing page from your client’s website. Important to check for conversion points and exit points on the page.

While the above list is not exhaustive, it will definitely help get your account moving in the right direction.

Conversion Marketing wrote this great post on how to increase your shopping cart conversion rates. Here’s a summary of the more important points:

1. Don’t place user registrations at the beginning of the checkout process. If you must have some form of user registration, put it at the end when the process has been completed. From experience this has got to be the biggest turn off when shopping online.

2. Reduce your load times. People hate waiting for a confirmation. Anything longer than 30 seconds and the user might think that something has gone wrong and bounce off the page.

4. Keep the process as simple as possible – point out mandatory fields in a form with nice, user friendly language. Don’t distract the users from the checkout process with other special offers. Let the user skip the shipping address form if the address is the same as the billing address.

5. Reduce load times on all pages, especially during the checkout processing. Anything longer than 30 seconds will make the user think an error has occurred.

6. Use analytics to pinpoint problem areas!

Check out the full post at Conversion Marketing.