The cost per click on digital media has increased sharply since the end of 2020. In this context of inflation, how can you optimize your customer acquisition marketing budget?
After dropping significantly in 2019 and 2020, CPC growth has accelerated since the end of 2020, as shown in the graph below (focused on Google shopping ads in the US):
The observation is the same with digital display media. The graph below shows the increase in revenue from these media, directly correlated to an increase in CPC:
During containment in 2020, CPCs continued to fall, as marketing budgets were largely cut, except of course in preserved sectors. At the end of the confinement, the companies relaunched their acquisition systems in order to accelerate the recovery as much as possible. Physical businesses, in particular, have sharply increased their digital media investments, in order to make up for lost time and regain their positions in a worried market and with increased competition. This has led to an increase in network prices, most often based on the cost-per-click model.
More generally, the inflation of digital media costs is correlated with an inflationary context of the economy. As shown in the chart below, 2020 was marked by a decline in inflation, followed by a significant rise in 2021.
One of the main digital media companies is, of course, Google Ads, and in particular sponsored search results (SEA). For this lever, there is a well-identified way to optimize the CPC: the quality score (quality score) of the ads.
Google defines it like this:
This variable, available at the keyword level, is measured on a scale of 1 to 10. The higher the Quality Score, the more relevant and useful your ad and landing page is, compared to other advertisers, for a user who searches for your keyword.
Thus, to increase the quality score and reduce the cost per click of SEA ads, it is a question of choosing keywords that are as targeted as possible and with high relevance to the landing page. This landing page must also be optimized to meet the expectations of Internet users who clicked on the ad. The more targeted ads you will have (on specific keyword groups) and the more landing pages you will have specially designed for these requests, the more your CPC will be optimized.
The most searched keywords by Internet users in your sector are also the most requested by your competitors, and therefore the most expensive.
Generally, these keywords are also the simplest and most direct: queries with 1 to 3 words, not very specific.
Creating ads on more specific queries has a double benefit:
Take the example of a company selling bicycles. The most generic queries relate to terms such as: “bicycle”, “electric bicycle”, “racing bicycle”, “bicycle purchase”, even names of bicycle brands. To be more precise, it is a question of identifying search sub-themes corresponding to the company’s offer, and of listing more precise queries corresponding to this sub-theme. So, if we take the axis of racing bikes, here are some examples of long tail queries: “best brand of road bike”, “price of a road bike”, “carbon road bike”, “ purchase of a new racing bike”, etc.
The CPC of SEA and display have increased, especially since these are the most used digital media, and the most requested. To optimize your CPC, you should therefore look at different digital media, to diversify your strategy, while focusing on the final performance in terms of conversion.
From this point of view, levers such as the native ads newsletter offered by Ividence (Dékuple group) make it possible to maintain a very reasonable cost per click while offering extremely fine targeting capabilities, and optimized by algorithms.
Reasoning only on the CPC is reductive, because it does not take into account the quality of the traffic generated. To really evaluate the ROI of an acquisition device, it is necessary to focus on the Cost of Acquisition (CAC), that is to say to manage the acquisition levers according to the value of the leads generated and therefore sales.
By having this more global approach, we see that there are other levers to optimize the acquisition budget, beyond the optimization of the cost per click of the channels used.
To create a ROIst acquisition campaign, it is first necessary to make sure to target the right audience. All the criteria for refining the target population must be taken into account:
These targeting capabilities depend on the media used.
In particular, Google and Facebook, for example, will offer very rich targeting qualities, based on data from their platforms, each with their strengths: Google has information on searches, Facebook has more information on “liked” brands, for example.
If you already have a first party customer database, then you can go further by targeting look-alike profiles of your customers, creating “look alike” audiences. This allows you to generally target profiles similar to those of your customers, but also to target more specifically the twin profiles of your best customers or buyers of certain categories of your products.
The main media platforms, such as Facebook, offer “look alike” targeting.
The Family Square solution allows you to adopt the same strategy, but on all channels, and in particular direct marketing channels: email, postal mail, SMS, telephone.
This solution allows you to analyze your contact database and qualify it in terms of socio-demographic and geographic data (household composition, income level, type of housing, proximity to shops, etc.). Each individual in your contact database is associated with a very specific geotype.
Then, Family Square also makes it possible to use Dékuple’s mega DataMatch repository to target profiles belonging to the same geotypes, and thus do look alike targeting based on socio-demographic data.
Retargeting and remarketing targeting techniques allow you to strengthen communication with individuals who have shown an interest in your brand.
First, how do we define retargeting and remarketing, and what sets them apart?
In addition to paying acquisition levers, betting on non-paying owned levers also reduces the overall acquisition cost.
These levers are mainly:
These levers require longer work, but have the advantage of not requiring any media purchase. The effort focuses mainly on the production of relevant content for the targets, in order to optimize its referencing on search engines (SEO), create interest and encourage prospects to identify with the brand.
This is called an inbound marketing strategy: the brand develops its visibility and attractiveness by responding to prospect searches with relevant and qualitative content.
The more “deep” the performance measurement indicator, the more the brand can optimize its acquisition levers, and thus reduce its overall acquisition cost.
Finally, to take the measure a notch further, it is interesting to follow the value of the customer acquired over time: this measure supposes setting up a CDP in order to aggregate the data coming from communication channels and customer data. This then makes it possible to compare, for each acquisition channel, the Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) of the customers acquired.
