What Will Marketing Optimisation Do For Me?
Fine-tuning you marketing optimisation to increase split-second performance
Marketing optimisation is key to getting the best ROI (return on investment) for every marketer. Optimisation is the on-going process of tweaking and adapting your marketing to get the best return.
Like an engineer tuning a car to increase split-second performance, marketers use data and testing to fine-tune their campaigns for the best results.
Where To Optimise?
It’s best to optimise marketing channels individually to get the best results for each.
You need to identify the KPIs (key performance indicators) for each stage of your campaign. KPIs tell you how well your marketing is achieving a specific objective. Then you can use this data to see where there’s room for improvement.
For example, the objective could be to get prospects to sign up for a free trial of your product. You plan to use Google Ads to drive leads to a landing page and you need to determine what your KPIs are.
Google Ad CTR (click-through rate) tells you how good your keywords are at attracting leads. High impressions to low clicks can mean your ad doesn’t appeal to people using those search terms.
Landing Page Landing Page Conversions (clicks to sign-ups) tells you how much your design, layout, and offer appeal to people clicking on your ad. High clicks to low sign-ups can mean your offer isn’t compelling.
PoS (Point of Sale) Free Trial Conversions (sign-ups to purchase) tells you how well your product performs compared to it’s positioning. High sign-ups to low purchases can mean that people who signed up for the free trial were expecting something different from your product.
What To Optimise?
Knowing which elements to change is tricky, even when you know your KPIs. Techniques like A/B split testing are good ways to see the effects the different elements of your campaign have. This is when you run 2 versions of an advert at the same time, with one key aspect changed.
Decide which elements you want to optimise in advance. These are the variables that you change across your ads. Looking at our previous example, these are a few elements you would want to optimise.
Google Ad There are 3 key elements on Google Ads you can change to improve your results. Copy, keywords, and budget.
- Copy – Run multiple iterations of your ad with different headlines and descriptions (and combinations of each) to determine what is most effective.
- Keywords – Add and remove keywords and negative keywords, measuring their success rate.
- Budget – Adjust your budget and where it’s applied, pulling it from less successful ads and putting more into the ones that are giving the best return.
Landing Page Due to the variety in landing page design there are many possible elements you could test. Design, copy, and sign up form are the main categories but each has many possible routes you can take.
Optimise one aspect of your landing page at a time so that you can accurately determine which element performs the best.
- Design – Anything from a small shift like the positioning of a form or a big change to the imagery as a whole.
- Copy – Changes to specific words and phrases or could be a larger change to the tone your copy takes.
- Form – There’s a surprising amount of variety you can test with forms. You can change the number of fields, what fields you use, or which fields are mandatory and which aren’t.
The Possibilities Are Endless
The list of what you can optimise goes on forever. To get the most out of your marketing you should plan your optimisation strategy and adapt it as your campaign develops.
Use data from your KPI’s and tests to fine-tune your marketing, just like an engineer would a car to increase split-second performance. Thorough testing and optimising is the difference between marketing that works and marketing that doesn’t. By adopting the optimisation mindset you can make your marketing reach its full potential.
