How to Optimize Campaign ROI without Touching Your Media

Two employees sitting at desk looking at laptop trying to optimize campaign roi Optimizing your programmatic media campaign is key to driving a powerful marketing machine. Of course, tweaking your bids, creative elements, and audience segments are the most obvious and some of the quickest ways to increase your campaign’s effectiveness. But there are several other ways to optimize campaign ROI without ever touching your media. In the daily grind to ensure every dollar of their hard-earned ad budget is being spent wisely, many marketers simply forget to leverage levers outside of their media buy to get the most performance possible out of their campaigns. Their landing pages lack call-to-action buttons. Websites become slow and dated. And media quality takes a backseat to hitting lower CPMs. To make meaningful improvements in your campaign, you can’t silo your strategy and just focus on the media buy. Optimize for the entire customer journey with these easy tips, and watch as small changes add up to big numbers when it comes to your conversions.

Reassess Your Landing Pages

A big part of marketing is knowing which campaign elements are most effective and optimizing toward those. You can do this with your landing pages too. The first step is setting up your page to collect metrics on what’s working and what’s not. With specialized A/B testing, you can run conversion-optimization campaigns to determine which website elements drive the most conversions. You can test different variations of your fonts, layouts, forms, and call-to-action buttons to ensure you’re providing the best possible user experience. Once you start getting results, it can be tempting to “set and forget” your landing pages over the course of many campaigns. However, if you want to really optimize campaign ROI and keep turning your visitors into customers, you must continue to evaluate your site elements on a regular basis.

Find Out Why They’re Bouncing

High bounce rates on your website can mean one of two things: you’re getting the wrong kind of traffic to your site, or you’re getting exactly the right kind. Quick exits sometimes mean that your visitors found exactly what they were looking for, but they didn’t have a reason to keep browsing. Make sure you feature links to other pages on your site and additional resources in order to keep your visitors interested. However, if your site isn’t relevant or easy to navigate for on-the-go visitors, of course, they’ll leave. There are dozens of top-notch website analytics tools on the market that can improve your bounce rates by removing channels sending low-value traffic and optimizing your layouts for mobile screens. Even if your site is extremely easy to use, most of the time your visitors will be in a hurry. If your site takes too long to load, you’ll lose that customer to the competition. According to eMarketer, 62% of consumers are unwilling to wait more than five seconds for a webpage to load.  Check your site’s results in Google Analytics and focus on improving pages with the highest bounce rates, highest exit rates, and highest page load times to increase your chances of creating a conversion.

Make It Easy to Find You

Regardless of how many retargeting ads you put out there, some people still prefer to start from a search engine. According to Google, 48% of the time a mobile journey to researching a brand starts with a search engine. That’s not to say your ad wasn’t successful in driving the awareness that kicked off this journey, but some customers still want to do the research and take a more organic route to your site. In these cases, it’s important that your site ranks high in search engine results for key products and words associated with your brand. Search engines are constantly crawling the web looking for fresh, relevant content and optimized images and videos on your site. So, the first step is to develop quality content, like blog posts and product pages featuring your top keywords. The second step is to keep them up-to-date. Also, be sure to use an SEO strategy that’s diversified with non-branded terms. Then, establish your credibility with search engines through keyword targeting, link acquisition, content syndication, and social media tactics. These will drive up your PageRank, or how trustworthy the search engine believes your page is on a particular topic. Finally, keep your SEM strategies on the cutting edge with targeted paid search campaigns to truly optimize campaign ROI. It may not be the sexiest marketing tactic, but location-based and cross-device paid search campaigns are a great starting point for those needing foolproof results.

Prioritize Quality Over Price

Before you celebrate that amazing deal you just picked up, make sure the inventory isn’t from the bargain bin. Often, inventory selling at low CPMs are fraud-ridden, with bots driving up click rates rather than true conversion rates. While our ability to detect fraud through ad verification tools is significant, there are several additional ways to ensure the inventory you’re buying is legit. Most important among them is to insist on using premium inventory from suppliers you trust. While your ad prices may go up with this strategy, you’ll likely get more value out of your media so your performance and brand safety actually improve beyond the cost difference. Looking for more advice on how to optimize campaign ROI and improve your digital results? Reach out to us today.