Improve your SEM Campaign: Did You Check Your CPA (Cost Per Action)?

CPA, or Cost Per Action, is an SEM (Search Engine Management) pricing model where the advertiser pays for a specified acquisition - for example a sale, click, or form submit (e.g., contact request, newsletter sign up, registration etc.)

We usually define CPA as a successful decision made by consumers, but what would you do when your CPA is higher than ideal or you want to further lower down the cost to bring up the ROI?

‘there are two parts to it – PPC optimization and landing page experience’-- that is what online answers or your agency might try or persuade you again and again. Well that is true but how exactly would you do it? Here are our advices.

Firstly, let’s eliminate the possible factors on landing page experience because if needed adjusting content on landing page usually takes longer time. There are 3 factors you want to check and eliminate:

1. Does that page load slow?

Slow loading website can result a high rate on sessions/clicks and this does not reflect on bounce rate.

2. Is the landing page experience not smooth?

Landing page should do its best to explain the product and provide an easy entry for next steps. Don’t let your users get lost in navigating and confused on what to buy. Give them a clear direction and eliminate distractions in content and layout design.

3. Is there no sign-up program to avoid loss of potential converters?

Your front-end PPC campaigns are responsible for bringing quality traffic but it doesn’t promise every click is an immediate conversion. Setting up a subscription program or at least ask for contact information will allow you to follow up this group of audience because they will be the most convertible groups in future.

Once you checked above factors then it’s time to look at your campaign optimizations, you can either ask your agency or have them check the following factors,

4. Are basic settings meeting the audience behavior?

Set up your campaigns individually toward specific regions, time period, device preference. You don’t want a general campaign to target mobile preferred teenagers who are only active during midnight.

5. Are keywords and creatives grouped and separated with different topic?

Because quality score is calculated at different level and cumulated, you want to separate different keywords precisely for best quality score and for monitoring. Once you have had a clear understanding of your best performing keyword groups you will have better ideas improving landing page experience as well.
If you have done this, make sure your creatives are adjusted toward each different ad group to increase CTR. Don’t forget to add the right call-to-action.

6. Are all possible additional format added to creatives?

Most PPC systems offer additional format like pictures, sitelinks, and other creative formats to enrich display and improve user experience. What this also brings is the credibility of the brand and followed conversion rate. Users are educated to trust advertisers that exposes more (necessary) information with versatile formats – as long as there are competitors.

7. Are you identifying yourself from competitors?

From creatives, mention your strength and be creative to stand out from your competitors

8. Are you constantly optimizing your bidding strategy?

Lowering down bidding doesn’t always hurt the final conversion – it might hurt CTR rate but if it makes a good deal why not? Trying adjusting your bidding at keyword level to see the difference in the final CPA number, if you see decrease in CPA by doing so then take your converting keywords and go back to the campaigns to increase those converting ones with a lower CTR. Repeat and you will be able to see see a constantly improved ROI.

If you are having trouble with your current PPC performance or would like to discuss this topic further please contact us at adstochina@westwin.com and we will answer in 24 hours.