Wasting Thousands On PPC And Not Realising?
PPC has become significantly more expensive over the last five years and along with an increase in cost, there’s also been increased competition which has has seen a steady erosion of the return on investment.
Today's Challenges
The likes of Google, Facebook and Bing have an oligopoly on online advertising and brands are worried that if they don’t play the advertising game, they’ll never get to the top of search engines. No matter your industry or niche, PPC is becoming more expensive, with some people even claiming that prices have been artificially inflated. But what if we told you there are some really simple steps that could significantly lower your cost? Steps which saved one client $3.5m…
Why It Might Be Happening
Attribution: All marketing platforms are greedy when it comes to attribution. For example if a prospective customer:
- Viewed your Facebook ad.
- Waited a few days for the weekend.
- Googled your brand and clicked on an ad link.
- Purchased something from your store.
- Both Google and Facebook will claim this conversion. Charge you for it. Not only will this cost you more but it will lead to duplication in your data and a distortion of your Cost Per Acquisition number.
Impressions: An Ad Impression should in theory tell you that your advert was shown to one person. But the reality is that if your ad loaded, but the user never scrolled down the page to where that ad was…it will still be counted. If your ad was going to be shown on a certain page, and the user had ad-blocker installed…it might still be counted. Google admitted that 56% of ad impressions may not have been viewable.
Slow Loading Pages: A slow-loading conversion page may actually be costing you money. When someone reloads an order confirmation page, it will fire a pixel which will tell Google ads that they have completed a pixel. So if that page takes a while to load, the person gets frustrated with a blank page and refreshes the site, you will have just paid twice for the same conversion.
What You Could Do Today
As a general rule of thumb 173tech would recommend that brands focus on using PPC to drive sales and less for brand awareness. If 56% of ad impressions may be viewable, you may be literally throwing half your money away.
Or see how 173tech can help…
When clients think about PPC it’s often only with the initial acquisition in mind. The real value of a customer goes way beyond one single interaction with your business. This is why its important to factor in Customer Lifetime Value with your decision making. While some keywords may be more expensive, if they will attract customers who will be worth more in the long-run, then the investment may be a no-brainer.
Allocate marketing spend to individual transactions based on UTM attribution. A UTM is a snippet of code attached to the end of a URL that allow brands to pinpoint specific sources of traffic to a website. Spending a little extra time and including this in your ad campaigns can save you significant amounts of money.
How We Could Help
High-quality pet supplement business Petlab were spending big on digital but lacking visibility on customer lifetime value and long-term marketing ROI, they wanted a centralised, accurate according of marketing spend and attribution.
We connected and modelled data from Shopify, Facebook, Google Ads as well as their subscription portal which enabled us to not only centralise the marketing spend but also create a comprehensive cohort analysis on subscription revenue and retention.
The centralised data pipeline and reporting helped Petlab’s marketing team identify huge cost-savings of $3.5m.
If you want to find out what the possibilities are for turning your data into business drivers, you’re not sure if your ideas for using data are technically feasible and will generate ROI or you have a specific use case in mind for your data but don’t know how to get started…get in touch with 173tech.