CPA campaigns can be a tough nut to crack! Don’t worry though, we got you covered.

We’ve collected our top tips and tricks to help you tackle your next CPA campaign.

To make things easier, we’ve collected all the information in a downloadable document that you can use as a guide whenever you’re managing your Zemanta campaigns. You can access the guide by clicking on the button below. It’s also available to download at the end of the article.

 

 

 

 

Now, let’s get started..

General Advice

• Think long-term! Generating conversions takes time, especially if you’re optimising for an increased customer lifetime value.
• Set a healthy campaign duration – with conversion campaigns, we recommend setting the campaign to run for at least 14 days or more in order to gain enough traction & data.
• Conversion optimisation start with targeting high quality traffic – make sure to set higher bid CPCs to attract good quality clicks. 
• Create multiple conversion pixels to track each step of the conversion funnel.
• If your conversion funnel consists of multiple steps, starts with optimising for a softer conversion. A soft conversion, for example, is getting a user to add your product to a cart or engage with your content. A hard conversion involves requesting a quote, submitting information, or buying a product.

 

Content Ads

• Emphasise your product’s benefits for the user.
• Address your target audience with your images & titles. 
• Include your KPI in ad titles: For example, if your goal is to drive eBook downloads, make sure you mention eBook in your titles.
• Use questions to encourage the reader to seek an answer.
• Use “you, free, instantly, because, and new“ to spark users’ attention.
• Use numbers in titles. For example, Liven up your living room with these 7 simple tips, works better than Here are some tips to liven up your living room.
• Use people-based images rather than products or places.

 

Landing Page Optimisation

• Reduce page weight – The longer the page’s load time, the faster visitors will abandon it.
• Try to shorten your conversion funnel as much as possible.
• Make sure your CTA stands out – your call to action button shouldn’t be the same as the rest of your design.
• Stay consistent with your brand assets – content ad images, wording and colours should match the style of the landing page. 
• Make sure to run A/B tests with your landing pages. What works for one audience, might not work for the other.
• Include a call to action on every page. You should lead the user through your funnel – don’t let them just wander around without a purpose.

 

Utilise Zemanta Optimisation Tools:

Zemanta One offers a lot of optimisation tools that allow you to shape the traffic that you buy, giving you more power and control over performance. 

Bid Modifiers: Adjust bids on every dimension (publishers, media sources, country, device, region, OS, placement).

Content Ad Optimisation: Pause underperformers or test different variations.

Publisher Targeting: Blacklist poor performers or whitelist best performing websites. 

Audience Targeting: Utilise interest, 1st or 3rd party audiences targeting to reach a specific group of users.

Budget Control: Enable budget optimisation and let our system define ad groups’ ideal daily cap.

First Party Analytics Integration: Understand how users behave after they have clicked on your ad.

Make sure to use all the tools wisely, we’ve gathered even more advice below: 

• Avoid frequent edits during the first couple of days. Zemanta’s ad delivery system relies on machine learning to optimise for your KPI. The more data the system collects, the better it becomes at optimising. 
• Wait until there’s enough data before you make any bigger adjustments – at least 50 clicks per entity or 2-3 x the value of your CPA goal.
• Be mindful of your budget – your daily cap per ad group should be at least 5x your CPA goal.
• Include one audience targeting tactic per ad group to ensure enough scale. Create separate ad groups later on if a certain dimension is proving to perform well.
• Stay away from CPM bidding when optimising for CPA or engagement to ensure that the campaign focuses on clicks rather than impressions.
• When adjusting bids on best performing entities, we recommend to increase the bid by at least 25-50% – don’t be shy!
• Rather than creating many ad groups to advertise to a narrow audience, try to combine similar ad groups into fewer, larger ad groups.

 

To sum up: 

Test, test, test! Ensure you are testing different content ads, messaging, and calls to action to discover which strategies work best with your target audience. 

And make sure to use learnings from other channels or previous campaigns and apply that knowledge to your future campaigns. For example, if your Facebook campaign works best in a specific geographical area, create an ad group targeting that area to reach a similar audience.

Last but not least – make sure to share your KPIs with our Zemanta team – we will be more than happy to work with you to optimise your campaign and surpass your goals.

 

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