How to keep your CPA down and increase conversion rates

Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) is a metric which measures how much you spend to attain each conversion.

But how do you attract the right kind of clients at just the right price?

Above all, you need good knowledge of the strategies proven to achieve such a goal. Our top tips for keeping your CPA cost down should help form the basis of your strategy.

Take a full final approach – Focus on building brand awareness first

It’s unrealistic to expect your audience to take action straight away, before they’ve become familiar with, and built trust in your brand.

It’s so important to make sure you have focused on brand awareness before you plough into a conversion campaign and are confident that your brand is perceived in a positive way by your audience.

Although conversion is often the ultimate goal, if it’s your sole focus, it will make for high CPA, or, may work for a time and then drop off. Instead you must start from the top of the sales funnel and narrow it down.

You must look at the bigger audience, explain who you are, what you do and why you’re better than your competition.

From here, move your audience into the consideration phase making it clear why should they pick you over others and then look to retarget them with more sales-focused messages. This is where you’ll see higher conversion rates.

Of course this is all basic marketing, but it’s so often neglected. It’s crucial to invest your time and money in every stage of your audience’s journey to prepare them for conversion and give them all the information they need, encouraging them to like the brand before expecting them to convert.

Consider this in terms of dating… you don’t ask someone to marry you straight away!

Test, test, test

Be sure to try multiple ad formats and different audiences, creative and messaging.

Ideally, do this in a sequence. For example, one month test the audience, the next month test the creative and the next the landing pages. Pick out what worked best and mix the winners at the end.

This should be a continuous process.

Knowing your audience

It’s important to segment your audience in multiple groups.

While your audience will likely be large, within it there’ll be sub-groups. Perhaps people at different life stages, for example newly-weds, mums and couples moving house.

Think about what their motivations are and target the groups individually and accordingly.

The more relevant your messaging, the better.

Targeting

Targeting is crucial in conversion campaigns.

There will be people who visit your website because of your other online marketing such as seeing a video ad or interacting with your social posts.

You need to make sure you retarget these website visitors and people who have engaged with your ads as they are the most likely to convert, hence the CPA will be lower.

Focus on best performing product/s

Regardless of the channel that you pick to promote a product, if it doesn’t sell well offline then it won’t online.

Pick the best performing ones as this is where you will see the best results.

Landing pages

Landing pages can make or break a campaign.

Make sure you compare and test different variations in the landing pages, different templates and messages.

Here at Mighty Social we align our creative a lot with a company’s website and landing pages to make the user journey smoother. Ideally, the user should click through to a page that has a similar look and feel to the rest of your website and display ads.

Make sure the message is clear when they get there, too.

Avoid big blocks of text. Include customer testimonials for social proof and all the product information they’ll need to make their decision.

Make the call to action button big, clear and visible and at the beginning of the page rather than at the end.

Whatever action you want your user to take, it should be quick and easy for them to do it.

For example, if you want people to register for a webinar, if the form is three pages long, nobody will sign up.

No matter how good your ads are, how sophisticated your targeting is, if your landing page is not optimised then people will abandon cart. Tiny tweaks and changes can make a huge difference to conversion rates.

Tracking and measurement

Make sure you’re measuring correctly otherwise you won’t have a clear cost per acquisition and you won’t learn anything from your ads.

Track every single audience and ad creative so you can see on the back end of the campaign what works and what doesn’t work – then focus on the ones that have the most impact.

The platforms themselves will only show you one side of the campaign and are generally reporting on first click, post-impression and cross-device results. Most website analytics (such as Google Analytics) will not cover this, so your social media results will look a lot smaller if a more complex attribution model is not considered.

Agree the measurement method and KPIs from the beginning and what tracking codes will you have between the ads, so you don’t waste any conversions.

It’s important as well to make sure you attribute correctly, otherwise your CPA will not be accurate.

Mostly, in conversion campaigns, it’s a multi touchpoint process. For example, your audience may see a TV ad, a social media ad, may visit your website or perform a direct search for your product or service. Mostly, the final touch point gets attributed the lead, which isn’t always accurate.

Often we see that following a paid ad campaign, the organic and direct search increases as people go off to search independently.

So, make sure you attribute a percentage of these sales to social media if you do see an unexpected increase for these channels while running a paid social campaign.

Be realistic with CPA and consider the bigger picture

It’s important to consider your results and CPA in context. It won’t be flat, it will fluctuate and there are always reasons for that.

If it’s a time of year like Christmas, for example, where a lot of other people are targeting your audience and a lot of other companies are running ads, it will increase your CPA, so you must take this into account.

What are your competition doing? Consider the wider environment and what’s happening with your competitors. Are they closing down? Are they down in sales? This will all affect your CPA and the number of leads and sales you get.

How we can help

With our extensive experience in delivering successful conversion campaigns for some of the world’s leading brands in a variety of industries, we can significantly enhance acquisition activity.

Add to this our unique targeting technology, the ATOM, which helps you identify your audience efficiently and effectively, delivering better quality leads, reducing waste and hugely improving your ROI on your social media marketing budget, and you’re in the best position possible to increase conversion rates.

Get in touch to learn how we can help you keep CPA down.