How to Improve Your Return on Advertising Spend (ROAS)
Learn to keep your spending in check
Whereas certain marketing metrics can be complicated to figure out, calculating ROAS is as simple as (Revenue – Cost) / Cost. ROAS will help you understand how your profit margin will look after deducting the various external spending costs. In this article, we’ll outline a number of simple steps you can take to help maximise your ROAS. Read on to find out more!
1. Invest in a Branded PPC Campaign
Branded PPC campaigns are a contentious topic among digital marketers. On one hand, some argue that they’re a waste of valuable resources, while other marketers suggest they’re a necessary evil in the highly competitive arena of PPC advertising.
It’s understandable to think that bidding on your own brand name is a pointless endeavour in a marketing campaign. Wouldn’t a customer simply find your business through organic searches if they already knew what they’re looking for? The issue with this line of thinking stems from the shady tactics of your competitors. Other businesses might bid on other businesses’ brand names – including yours! So this way it’s better to stay ahead and control the conversation of your brand in our own advertising efforts.
2. Negative Keywords
Negative keywords prevent advertisements from being displayed for a particular set of words and phrases. If you are running an ad campaign for ‘football boots’, you’ll include words and phrases such as: ‘hiking shoes’, ‘sandals’, ‘flip-flops’ and ‘running shoes’ etc. to your list of negative keywords.
Doing this will prevent your ad from appearing in SERPs for users who have entered those irrelevant keywords. Otherwise, a user could click your ad by accident, or even out of curiosity, despite having no intention of purchasing football boots. Putting a stop to window shoppers from clicking your links will dramatically improve the quality of traffic you attract and reduce spending wastage.
3. Optimize Your Landing Page
Landing page optimization is crucial to your conversion rate success. Getting people to click your ads is great, but if they’re not making any purchases after arriving on your landing page, what’s the point? This can be down to a badly designed sales funnel or a landing page that doesn’t serve its purpose.
Remember that a landing page isn’t a one-size-fits-all scenario. That is to say, if you’re directing all traffic to the same landing page then you need to re-evaluate your current strategy.
Create separate landing pages for each audience you’re trying to attract. This will help to streamline your sales funnel and make the user experience much smoother. Potential shoppers want to be in and out as quickly as possible, so a specific landing page for individual clusters will definitely serve your ROAS much better.
4. Improve Your Quality Score
Quality score definition: the estimate of the quality of your Google ads, keywords and landing pages. A higher quality score can lead to lower prices and improved ad positioning. It includes the expected click-through-rate (CTR), ad relevance and landing page experience.
A better quality score will directly impact and decrease your cost per conversion – improving your ROAS. Do this by tailoring your ad copy to increase ad relevancy and CTR, re-structuring your ad campaigns into smaller, more focused ad groups, and optimising your landing pages to improve the user experience.
5. Adjust Bids Based on Time & Location
If you notice that your ads aren’t converting at a particular time or on a particular day of the week, it means you’re wasting resources by advertising at these times – as the clicks aren’t providing a benefit.
A way to combat this and to save on advertising costs and improve your return on ad spend is to decrease your bids during these slow times, helping you to cut down on wasteful ad spending. The opposite tactic can also be implemented in situations where you notice a particular time or day of the week when your conversions are high.
Regarding location, if you notice specific locations are converting better than others, then you should increase or decrease your bids accordingly. If you want to increase people entering your physical store, use geo-targeting to avoid advertising to people who will never make the journey.
6. Adjust Bids Based on Device
Moving on from the previous point, you can adjust your bids depending on the device that is being used. Whether it’s mobile devices, tablets or desktop computers – specific bid limits can be set for each one.
Desktop clicks are typically the most valuable, as studies have shown that the average buyer will do their research on a mobile phone or tablet before moving on to a desktop computer to complete the purchase. Although this is not true for every buyer, it paints a fairly accurate picture of regular buyer behaviour. Improve your ROAS by using the desktop bids as a benchmark and adjust your tablet and mobile bids down from that.
