Metrics to help you STOP Wasting your Ad Spend

This month we are talking about important metrics to watch for when looking at your Paid Online Advertisements. After you’ve launched an ad, I like to wait at least a couple weeks for programmatic, google search, or social media campaigns to work their magic and then I check out these three metrics in google analytics: Website Engagement Rate, Time on Page, and Cost per Conversion. We’re going to start with my very favourite, the Engagement Rate.

1. Engagement Rate Definition:

The percentage of how many people clicked on your ad and engaged with your website in some manor. Industry-standard is to have your engagement rate sitting at around 60%.

Paid ads tend to run a little lower with a goal of around 35%.

If your engagement rate is lower than 15% and you are paying thousands of dollars for an ad campaign… stop the “presses”.

Imagine you’ve driven 500 unique users to your page through this ad with a goal to get email subscribers, this rate means that only 75 people actually spent more than a few seconds there. Even if your website converts +4% of website visits to subscribers… you are not getting any new leads with this campaign.

It’s time to cancel and optimize. Something is definitely up and people are not getting the content they are expecting when they click your ad. This damages your SEO, doesn’t help your clients find you, and worst of all this is costing you more money than necessary.

How do we fix this? Refine your audience, ensure that the creative is designed to convert and has a call to action, double-check your page load times, ensure your page content is relevant to the ad, test test test the process, and give it another go!

Good ads, with good ad placements, and good systems convert. Digital Ad agencies tell me that my campaigns convert higher than they have ever seen and my results average at 50% engagement rate and 8% conversion unique user to subscriber.

Is this all greek to you? Sign up for a personal 2-Hour Digital Campaign Review for just $765. Learn how to save thousands off of your annual marketing ad spends and make quality ads that help connect your clients directly to you!

2. Time-on-Page Definition:

This metric is calculated by the time difference between the point when a person lands on the page and when they move on to the next one.

In my experience, you want that time to average at least a minute and a half, with great pages performing at 3+ minutes. You might say, “But Kathryn, my page must be optimized so well that people navigate to another page by the 30-second mark!” and to that I say… are you sure?

If your website isn’t at the 1-minute mark yet, here are some ways to add useful content that doesn’t impact your pages load speed (how long someone has to wait to view anything on your page).

Do’s
Post engaging sliders and a variety of quick-to-load content below the fold that tempts the reader to learn more about all that you have to offer before leaving the homepage.

Have links that open in new tabs. You’ll notice during our website optimization sessions that I set all your social links and any links that navigate to a new website open up to a new window. Some more examples include Feature Listngs and Mortgage Calculators. This is so if the viewer gets distracted away from your page, they will still have your page open during that time and when they’re done going down the rabbit hole of mortgage calculations, they still have your page open and connect back to you at the end-of-the-day.

Don’ts

Don’t add video to your homepage. This will have a negative impact on your page’s load speed, your engagement rate will decrease, and your SEO will suffer. If you must have video content on your homepage, place it lower down below “the fold” in order to allow enough time for it to load in before your viewer scrolls down to it.

Don’t hide the information your clients are looking for in hopes that they’ll spend more time looking for it. They won’t! I think this goes without saying, but you want to make sure your viewers can find your contact information, book a showing, or search for the latest listings as easily as possible. Don’t make them scroll to do this and you’ll see your engagement rate increase as well as your time-on-page.

Don’t post your social links in your header menus. You might want to show off your social channel’s content, and there are great ways to do that including getting the Smash Balloon Plug-In. Posting social links in the header makes it way too easy for your viewer to immediately navigate away from your website and off to the social media rabbit hole.

3. Cost-per-Conversion Definition:
TOTAL COST FOR CAMPAIGN
DIVIDED BY
NUMBER OF NEW LEADS
EQUALS = CPC

$3,000/200= $15 CPC

How much are you paying for each of your leads? Is your campaign optimized to its full potential or are 98% bouncing before they even read who you are? There is so much involved in creating a stellar paid advertising campaign and your dollars are being wasted if you’re not optimizing the funnel every step of the way.

Here are my steps to creating the lowest CPC:

1. Learn where your organic leads are already coming from, start investing in paid advertising on those channels with proven conversion

2. Define your target audience and key messages

3. Determine your call-to-action and tell your viewers exactly what you want them to do and make that process seamless

4. Provide immediate value in return for their contact information

5. Use consistent messaging and imagery throughout the campaign

6. Create a custom landing page that takes your reader directly to the information that they are seeking

7. Automate lead creation so when they fill out the form, their information goes directly into your CRM

8. Create a redirect thank you page that takes the lead back to your website

9. Create auto-responses by email AND text SMS

10. Create your advertisements

Is this all Greek to you? Sign up for a personal 2-Hour Digital Campaign Review for just $365 or join me on ZOOM for Digital Marketing Happy Hour, every fourth Tuesday, at 3:00 PM, you’ll find out how to find all three metrics and a whole lot more. Learn how to save thousands off of your annual marketing ad spends and make quality ads that help connect your clients directly to you! Sign up for your email invite at swankcreative.com/signup