CRO will increase your ROAS by optimising website traffic through personalisation and A/B testing.
Could your landing page be working more efficiently to convert that hard-earned paid traffic? After all the effort you have put into getting consumers to your website, are they met with a ‘one-size-fits-all’ landing page and a generic journey into conversion?
You can improve your cost per acquisition (CPA) and ROAS by creating symmetry between the off-site to on-site experience.
Landing page optimisation is key.
Before creating any kind of ‘personalised’ experience between your paid media and your website, you should be actioning the fundamentals around landing page optimisation. This will include A/B/n and MV testing (if you have enough volume) your headlines, images, layout, order etc.
Regardless of your audience, your landing page should be optimised to the ‘status quo’.
It's all about symmetry.
Let’s start with the fundamentals of creating symmetry between your paid ads and your landing page.
Customers have different intentions when they visit your website. Even if the objective of their visit is to make a purchase, their journey to get there is not necessarily linear. Your aim should be to address their needs as soon as they arrive, guiding them with relevant content.
This can be as simple as creating alignment between a paid keyword and the landing page the customer arrives on.
For example, a consumer types in the specific keyword of ‘online tax return.’
There are two elements to this keyword: ‘online’ and ‘tax return’ and whilst your landing page may fulfill both and more, it’s likely the ‘online’ part of that query is going to be only a part of the services you offer.
Through your testing platform, you can adjust headlines, prominent CTAs and reword copy to speak to that ‘online’ specific need, instantly building relevance for your customers. We can then use this for A/B testing to validate uplifts.
This is not just applicable to Search Engine Marketing (SEM), but anywhere a query parameter can be appended, which includes display, social and referral traffic. Think about how your landing page serves a specific customer arriving from a given source; then ask, ‘Can I build symmetry between the experience they have clicked from and my landing page?’
With this approach, research is required into the volume of your campaigns to make sure you are impactful in your experimentation. As much as everybody wants to reach a 1:1 personalisation strategy, that’s not the most efficient way!
So then how do we develop these fundamental principles into something more? We start thinking about how to align more than simply basic content changes and scale that up to an adjustment of an entire experience and/or funnel to fit your paid media strategy.
Exceed your customer's expectations.
We already understand the value of personalisation through Dynamic Creative Optimisation (DCO), but does this carry through to the landing page? It’s all too common for there to be a disconnect when they arrive on the website.
Cue a meaty hypothesis and a team of CRO specialists to bridge that gap into a seamless experience that guides your customers to their desired goal.
For example, an automotive brand is using DCO to drive customers through to their new model landing page; we know the experience for these customers is the same regardless of their purchase intent, interests or lifestyle.
Two segments from the dynamic creative based on viewing behaviours and demographics included ‘families’ and ‘car enthusiasts.’ These two groups of people have completely different intentions on the website when it comes to looking at the features of this new car – and that could make all the difference in helping them convert.
Looking at that landing page we can start to adjust and reorder content to fit these groups. ‘Families’ will see more prominent content surrounding comfort, multimedia and luxury whilst ‘car enthusiasts’ will see more content surrounding car specs and engine power. This experiment more than doubled the conversion rate of our primary metric.
To further bolster your strategy, consider also reviewing heatmapping performance to understand where and how customers are engaging on your page; from there you know what to amend. If customers are only scrolling down to a certain module, you won’t have much success in amending anything below that point.
This example does not just apply to dynamic creative. Depending on your traffic heatmapping channels, entire experiences can be adjusted based on customer insights. Ask yourself, do you have opportunities with your retargeting strategies to refine the mid to lower funnel experience? Or, based on your programmatic audience segmentation, can you amend content on-site based on demographics, geographics or behavioural insights?
We have talked about the ways you can boost your media strategy through personalising that on-page experience, but how about informing your media strategy through experimentation results?
Experimentation can feed your media strategy.
A/B/n and Multivariate (MV) testing delivers infinite insights through the in-depth study of experimentation results. With the endless dimensions available within web analytics platforms, you can begin to formulate plans for your iterative experimentation and media strategies.
Our final example comes more organically from our core experimentation strategy and speaks to the importance of thorough reporting and analysis.
Looking at an example for an ISP, we wanted to understand the most effective price point and value proposition for the core audience to drive revenue.
A simple A/B/n test was implemented to find the strongest return on content while offering infinite potential when exploring the results.
In this instance, we analysed results against demographic data and found that various age groups converted differently depending on the price point and value proposition.
This meant that whilst our A/B/n test resulted in a +24% increase in conversion rates for the core audience, these segmented groups offered a lot more opportunity to further improve on that.
Of course, there are many ways to personalise content on the site depending on your tech stack. However, by pushing these insights into our client’s programmatic strategy we created data-driven ads and then aligned the content on the landing page to them, streamlining conversion funnels, and leading to a further 36% increase in conversion rates.
This example also highlights the importance of finding a data-driven clear-cut opportunity before creating your personalisation. If there is not an opportunity to personalise to a specific group, that is not a problem; we would start you off with core landing page and funnel optimisation and then use those results to inform a personalisation strategy.
Whether you are looking to simply optimise traffic to your website or overhaul your entire programmatic strategy, investing in CRO is one of the most fundamental ways to achieve online success. Through our structured research and experimentation frameworks, our team of specialists at Resolution digital will help you to optimise the customer experience on your website, app and other touchpoints, leading to an increase in your conversion rates.
Google Optimize is sunsetting on 30 September
Which alternate provider should you go with? The Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) Experimentation Matrix allows you to easily compare vendors across the complex landscape.
