There's A Bad CPA On The Rise

"One who asks a question is a fool for five minutes;
one who does not ask a question remains a fool forever."
- A Chinese Proverb

I was asked a good question today that I thought would be great for CVoD to republish...

Andrew,

Top o' the morning to you.

Question: Any reason, one-way or the other, why the Google PPC cost per new sub acquired is rising? I noticed it's gone from $4 (Feb) to $4.95 (Mar) to $5.50 (Apr)? Is there any level for Google that would cause you to want to pull back, change the landing page, etc?

Thanks,

MC

Good Question, eh?

I'm a big believer in keeping communication flowing between IT, marketing, copywriting and editorial. I enjoy working with people who are not afraid to ask questions and are looking to learn. Those are the people I want on my team. Conversely, the biggest fear I have as a businessman is apathy. It's a cancer and will kill your business fast.

I digress... here's my answer...

MC,

The costs are always rising. The clicks are competitive and thus we often have to pay more to get a high placement. In the alternative... we could choose not to bid for the most active keywords and thus, pay less per name. However, that would result in acquiring half the names we are currently getting. I won't do that... it's not good marketing.

Most of the time costs rise due to falling conversions. That is the case here... our landing page conversions are going down.

Why?

For one, we are targeting the campaign to cover a narrow area of the world. That means more competition and higher bids. Copy fatigue is common too... after all this campaign is three months old. So the drop in conversion is normal.

Testing?

We've tested format and copy in A/B splits. We've also recently completed a multi-variable test with 108 different combinations... it gave us a new control with a 19.8% conversion rate. That is extremely high - the envy of every marketer I talk to.

And now we are testing that page against the runner up... and then after that we'll test another 100 or so combinations to push the conversions even higher.

That's what I do...

All that said, I have talked to the powers at be about scaling back... but they said due to the roaring market to keep going. You don't change horses in the middle of the stream, eh?

So we go forth... with a goal of always improving landing page conversions.

Thanks,

AP

PS - My goal is to stay under $5... and I didn't do that in April. We need to improve on that.

If you have any marketing questions... please feel free to forward them to createvalueordie@gmail.com and I'll answer them on the blog.