Cost per acquisition campaigns can offer a fairly sure-fire way to gain new customers through digital advertising. As the marketer only has to pay upon a conversion, there is relatively little risk. However, there are still a number of pitfalls that can prevent a campaign from being successful. Here are a few of the most common to help you improve the impact of your next initiative.
In general, marketing campaigns are never perfect. Every initiative has areas that can be improved. Many marketers, however, quickly become complacent after launching a digital marketing project. They expect that what worked for them last year will work for them this year. If you want to continue to run a successful campaign, you will need to make adjustments. As such you should evaluate every keyword and parameter that drives your CPA initiative.
With most digital marketing networks, budgets are set as a daily value. This may mean that you are running out of your designated ad spend by midday. If this is the case, you either need to increase your budget or find a way to spread it further. If you do not do this, you will be leaving a significant portion of the day in which you are not acquiring new customers. Should you find that you cannot increase your budget, chances are that you are not gaining significant enough margins on each sale.
Although CPA campaigns are only paid on a per acquisition basis, that doesn’t mean that marketers can’t make common mistakes leading to poor turnover. Probably the most common of these is having ads click through to a landing page that doesn’t match the ad. A similar mistake is to display ads to a specific keyword without including that keyword in the ad. Working on a CPA basis is not an excuse for poor marketing practices.
Just as bad keyword and landing page practices can bring down a CPA campaign, failing to test new assumptions also can. In the digital realm, there is no excuse for not performing pilot A/B testing. It is extremely easy and many networks even provide native functionality to run such tests. Doing so will not only save you the headache of having to adjust a full swing initiative, it could also prevent you from investing into a bad idea. In less extreme scenarios, testing may simply enable you to optimize your campaign to gain the most results for your ad spend. Isn’t that something that every marketer wants?
Sometimes smaller networks offer a lower CPA. However, this may be a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Although you will save per acquisition, you may find that you are actually ending up with less profitability than you would have with a broader, better known option. Not only do such networks have less reach, they also have far greater fluctuations. As such, something that is working well one day, may take a quick nose dive the next. While it is definitely worth exploring additional option, be sure to thoroughly vet and test new CPA network options.
Simply avoiding thee common mistakes will help to ensure that your next CPA campaign is a huge success. Although you may have guaranteed returns, that does not mean that you should run a poorly optimized promotional initiative. Consider all of these pitfalls as you plan your strategy.