One of the top benefits of paid online marketing is an extremely measurable ROI. You often have a very clear picture of what you’re spending and how many conversions you’re receiving as a result. This is a big advantage over many digital marketing tactics where it’s hard to connect results to your bottom line.
With such an easy to measure ROI, online marketers often obsess over optimizing their returns and generating even more positive value from their investments.
This discussion will explore 6 common ways that you can boost your ROI from online marketing.
Strategy #1: Put Your Best Offerings Forward
Your business may offer a wide selection of products, services and other offerings. This can make it difficult from a marketing standpoint because you have to make strategic decisions about what products or services you put forward.
If you advertise everything you offer at once, it creates a number of problems:
- You will rapidly burn through your marketing budget
- It will be near-impossible to optimize every ad group, campaign, keyword, landing page, etc.
- Not all of your products offer a product margin with room for online marketing spend.
Therefore, it is crucial to put your best products first. This is especially true for new online marketers or small businesses that don’t have the time or know-how to optimize several different campaigns simultaneously.
There are a few different ways you can define your “best” products:
- The products with the biggest profit margins, thereby the highest possible ROI
- Your most popular, best-selling items
- The items that people are most commonly searching for
- Items people search for with little-or-no competition
However you choose to define your top products, advertising this select group over your entire selection will allow you to better optimize your ROI. You’ll only market the products that promise good returns for one reason or another.
Strategy #2: Track Your Conversions!
There are an overwhelming and unfortunate number of online marketers that either have no conversion tracking at all, or have set up their conversion tracking incorrectly. You need to accurately be able to know when conversions are occurring and where they are happening. Particularly, you need to know which conversions are a result of your online marketing efforts.
When conversion tracking is properly enabled, you have a more accurate measure of which keywords are providing results. You’ll also be able to identify the keywords that are creating clicks that don’t result in conversions. This directly damages your ROI and needs to be fixed!
There are different types of tracking you can implement. Ideally, you want to track every channel you’re using. For example, if customers are also calling you from your online marketing messages, then you need to implement call tracking.
Enabling each tracking method will allow you to segment your conversion activities based on where they are coming from. Then, you’ll know what tactics are netting you the most conversions. And the Conversion in the google shopping campaign optimization is necessary too.
Strategy #3: Tighten Your Audience
One of the most common ways that online marketers unknowingly harm their ROI is targeting too broad of an audience. Or, targeting too many audiences at once. To optimize your ROI, you want to keep your audience targeting narrowly focused on the segments that have been proven to provide returns.
For example, if you were running a landscaping company, you wouldn’t want to target your ads in urban areas where people rarely have yards. Similarly, a boat repair shop wouldn’t advertise in land-locked areas.
When you first created your online marketing strategies, you had an audience in mind. To improve your ROI, it is important to routinely revisit this audience targeting. Are there any ways that you can refine it further? Are there some audiences that are eating into your budget more than others?
If you find yourself running out of budget early in the day, it may be a result of a too-broad audience targeting strategy.
Strategy #4: Run Your Best Ad Messages
Once your campaigns have been up and running for a few months (with conversion tracking properly set), you’ll have a good pool of data to work with. As you’re analyzing that data, pay close attention to how each unique ad message performs.
There is a point where even if your audiences and keywords are properly optimized, you may still be hurting your ROI because your ad copy is not effective enough at enticing customers. Or, your ad copy is not relevant enough to the targeted keyword.
Digging into the ad copy of each campaign or ad group will allow you to measure the success of each message against one another. This practice will help you understand what sort of offers and language entice clicks the most. And, you’ll be able to identify and revise ad copy that isn’t converting.
Strategy #5: Landing Page Optimization
ROI can be earned or lost thanks to your landing pages. When a customer clicks a PPC ad or a sponsored post, you are charged your cost-per-click amount. It’s up to your landing page to carry this click home to a conversion. Otherwise, you’ve paid for the click but didn’t receive any returns.
Similar to your messages and ad copy, your landing pages also create data. You need to pay attention to the insights within this data and find ways to improve your landing pages.
Relevance is vital. If your landing pages are not relevant enough to the ad copy, it creates a negative, disjointed experience.
Strategy #6: Remarketing!
When leads click away before converting, all is not lost! Thanks to remarketing scripts, you can re-engage these individuals later on and in other places across the Internet. This can encourage these audiences to return and finish their conversion activity.
Remarketing is an effective, ROI-boosting strategy because it targets people that have previously demonstrated an interest in your brand and products. These are more qualified leads that are already aware of your brand. Plus, you’ve already paid for their traffic! Retargeting can turn this otherwise lost spend into a conversion, even after the person leaves your website!
Conclusion
Optimizing ROI is an ongoing process where marketers analyze their online strategies to determine which ones provide negative and positive results.
When tactics produce negative results, it’s important to find out why and see if it is possible to fix this low performance. Otherwise, it may be best to pause those strategies.
Similarly, your tactics with the highest ROI can also be a goldmine of insight that you can use to influence your other efforts and improve the strategies that aren’t making the cut.
