Why You Need To Care About Website Optimisation As Much As Your Digital Advertising

Digital advertising is great for a number of things, but what marketers and business owners primarily like to use this medium for is sales. Why? Because you can measure it, If you put $1 into an advertising campaign you can easily measure the return on investment that $1 will generate you. Sounds great right? That’s because it is. What’s even better is you can then optimise those advertising campaigns by testing more targeted audiences and different ad messaging to get even more return for each $1 you put into your advertising.

However, we often miss a beat when doing all of this because there is only so much you can optimise a campaign in Google Ads, Facebook or DV360 until you are running a pretty smooth operation. So how do you improve and continue to get sales while there are 30 other competitors all optimising and coming after your market share and customers therefore raising your cost of acquisition? The answer is Conversion Rate Optimisation, or in layman's terms, website optimisation.

What is Conversion Rate Optimisation?

Conversion rate optimisation is the practice of changing a website so that it converts users into sales or leads at a higher rate. If you have 10 users to your website and 1 of them converts into a sale or lead, you have a conversion rate of 1%. CRO and UX specialists earn their buck by increasing this number from 1-2% and beyond. The higher your website conversion rate, the more money you make.

How do you optimise your Conversion Rate?

This is the hard part, CRO is a specialist skill that only few really know how to do effectively. It’s a mix of user experience design, combined with hard data to make decisions that improve website performance. To really improve conversion rate you need to implement testing programs where you A/B test what works and what doesn’t. There is no rule book, different businesses and industries have different formulas of what will work. You send traffic from a particular traffic source, say Facebook to two different landing pages, and via statistical significance see which converts better.

Let’s put this in mathematical terms.

If we put $100 into an advertising campaign and get 100 users to a website for that cost we may convert 4% of those users into customers, therefore getting 4 customers for $100 marketing spend. All sounds great because if the market size is big enough we can spend $200 and get 8 customers, or $400 and get 16 customers. But how about we don’t spend more money on ads and instead optimise our website so it has a better user experience for our potential customer? Say we optimise this and double our conversion rate from 4% to 8%. We can then spend $100 and get 8 customers. Then if we double our advertising spend to $200 we get 16 customers and so on. All in all, we begin performing much more efficiently and effectively while giving our customers the best experience possible.

Summary

You will get to a point in any digital advertising campaign where you can’t optimise anymore and continue to get significant gains. From here the biggest and most foremost thing you can do is turn your eyes to your website/landing pages. Develop a testing program, improve conversion rate and you can get more out of your media spend. Test often, pivot fast, be data-led and soon your advertising campaigns will work harder for you than you ever knew they could.