6 ways your paid media strategy can benefit from cro
CRO is a tactic that sits across all digital channels with unique ways it can help maximise the performance of those channels.
When it comes to paid media, your budget is being spent to bring relevant traffic to specific landing pages or your home page in the hope of conversion. CRO contributes to the broader mission of optimising those pages receiving the traffic to better the user journey and help those people advance down the funnel.
how can cro help you drive maximum performance?
Landing pages offer conversion opportunities but effectively optimising them is a common challenge we see marketers face. This is where CRO can help, providing the tools and techniques to fine-tune your website and make the most of conversion opportunities.
get the basics right
CRO is essentially housekeeping of your website to ensure pages are set up as effectively as possible. If your landing pages arent well optimised, they’re too text-heavy, take too long for users to understand what your site is about or there isn’t a clear CTA, the result will be higher bounce rates. Consider how you can get the page mechanics right by asking questions such as:
is the CTA in the right place?
does the page hierarchy make sense?
is the information presented clear and succinct?
is the page engaging above the fold?
is the page geared up below the fold to provide the answers to the questions users have?
If you want to find out more about how to improve your PPC landing pages to grow conversions, read our blog on the topic: 6 ways to improve your PPC landing page.
conduct opportunity analysis
Conduct analysis to understand which keywords users are coming into the site from and where on your site they’re landing. We often see that the majority of traffic comes into the homepage. But the homepage is usually generic, acting as a gateway to the wider website. As such, this can create too much choice and distraction.
Is this the best place to get users to take the actions you want?
Typically, it’s more effective to take users down a streamlined path without distractions. One way of doing this is through a reduced navigation, allowing the user to reach the page they want with minimal clicks. If you’re paying for traffic to reach your website through PPC, be sure to send them to a destination that serves their needs. CRO can then work to make the most of the traffic you created by turning interested users into converted customers.
Analysis can bring opportunities for new landing pages to the light, giving you the insight to create more appropriate destinations, improve the user journey and maximise conversions.
make considered improvements
CRO is wide scaling, ranging from small, tactical changes to huge page, component or even website changes. No matter how big or small improvements are, they need to be done with the data and your users in mind.
If your site is confusing to a user or if the content doesn’t correlate with what they expect, they won’t perform the action you want them to when they arrive on your site. But how can you spot these issues and improve them?
This is where CRO and UX cross over. There are many moving parts to a website, so, to make things easier, we boil it down to best practice principles and page mechanics. Using CRO and UX tactics, we can ensure that the customer journey is as friction-free as possible and that visitors understand what they need to within the first five seconds of landing on your site. This allows us to take a tailored approach to each page, creating the page structure based on UX principles and using CRO to make improvements based on testing.
The iteration process begins straight after that first test. Through the iterative cycle of analysing, testing, learning and improving, we can continue to spot opportunities for further improvements to create landing pages that convert.
use proof of concept to support investment
Businesses are quick to spend money to get visitors to their site. However, once that person lands on your site, the focus needs to shift to creating an experience that gives the best possible chance of converting that user.
If you’ve invested a lot in your website before, it may be harder to sell further investment to your stakeholders. By letting go of subjectivity, we can add a more objective view to your case. Using the data gleaned from CRO testing, you can show an opportunity and clearly explain why it’s an opportunity. CRO proves the concept as well as the benefits so further investment becomes less of a risk.
This approach can be done in a few ways. For example, you can prove the impact of a change on your paid campaign to gain the development budget to make that change. Or you could split the test into two different website destinations at paid media level to understand which performs best.
landing page flexibility
Your website may offer limited capabilities when it comes to creating and editing landing pages. There are still tactics that can be used to make this easier such as leveraging personalisation on the homepage. For example, if you can’t edit and recreate the full page, you could change the header to relate to a keyword the user is coming to that page from. This will help to create a more harmonious offsite and onsite journey for the user.
Or you may prefer your agency to build landing pages for you. For our CRO team to conduct a test, there needs to be a page available, a placeholder we can use, or we can build one for you and start testing from that point.
close communication between paid and cro
Key to success is the relationship between your paid media and CRO teams. Whether they are in-house, you work with agencies or a combination.
A consistent dialogue that brings your PPC and CRO strategies together serves many benefits. If you have plans for paid media traffic to be diverted to a certain area of your website, working closely with CRO, you can analyse those pages to understand their current performance. What is the bounce rate? Is work needed on the page before traffic is diverted to it? Sending traffic to a page that needs optimisation work will impact your overall paid campaign performance so it’s best for paid media and CRO efforts to work hand in hand, and therefore your teams too.
With experts dedicated to both, this is something we’re easily able to achieve at equation. It could be as simple as jointly attending client meetings and maintaining a close and continuous dialogue.
developing your cro strategy
CRO can have a positive impact on the online experience of your users as well as your paid media campaigns. With tactics like this in place, you can focus on improving website performance, bettering the user journey while making the most of your budget and that all important traffic you’re driving.
If you want to find out how working with a CRO agency can help you make the most of your paid media strategy, get in touch.
