Learn how one startup doubled CPL and saved money

Stop me if you have heard this one before: We want the cheapest lead possible.

One consistent theme that I hear from startups and international brands is people asking for a cheaper lead each month and year over year.

However, that is the faster way to waste money and, in some unfortunate events, go out of business. There are a couple of reasons why you don’t want the cheapest lead:

1. Paying Customers: A cheap lead looks great early on but as you spend money each month and see fewer leads convert into a customer, it becomes increasingly hard to justify your spend on paid advertising.
2. Wasted Time: If your leads are not converting then this means you are wasting a lot of time on business development that is not helping your business grow. You want to spend time on the leads most likely to convert.

Let me give you a real-world example. We spent the last eight months working with a SaaS startup that competes with Shopify, WooCommerce and Magento in the e-commerce space. We took on the SaaS startup when their cost per lead (CPL) was $49 and their cost per acquisition (CPA) for a paying customer was $1,734.

The startup wasn’t happy as the number of leads that turned into customers was inconsistent from month to month, and they were wasting thousands of dollars on keywords that were not converting. Worst of all, the data they had was a mess to sift through due to a poor strategy.

This meant we had to get the advertising spend under control, make sure we had proper data to work with and truly understand the type of customer who was going to convert. When we did all of the above, we achieved the following, even though we doubled their CPL in the process:

• Lowered their purchase CPA by 55 percent
• Larger deal size leads that the sales team could sell to
• Had consistent sales each month compared to the last three in-house people
• Brought in customers that have a similar or higher LTV

How did we do this? Let me walk through our plan of attack as we launched this brand in eight countries within the first three months of working together.

Working with data

Data is at the heart of what do we as PPCers. However, the client didn’t have a data framework to understand what was working on Google and Bing. The first thing we did was an audit on their advertising and analytics accounts to make sure everything was set up correctly.

Once we fixed a few issues and made sure we had a UTM tracking bible in place that everyone in the company understood, we got on with the heavy lifting.

Having a consistent and standard naming convention saves time and money. A good example is how your company names paid search traffic; is it CPC or PPC?

Having a single source of truth makes it easy to compare results as the company grows and accumulates more data. This startup was going to have a large amount of data as we planned to launch in eight countries within the first three months of working together. to know more here

source:- Search Engine Land  blog