Paid media – PPC, Paid Social and Display, specifically – is one of our core services. Along with SEO, these channels are what we do day-in and day-out for the world’s best lifestyle brands. It’s what we’ve done collectively for over 30+ years. And through those years, we’ve rarely seen a time and a place where Paid Media doesn’t make sense in a media mix. But once in awhile there is. If any of the following are happening to your website, you may want to rethink Paid Media in your current mix:
Your conversion rates are less than .5% and you can’t quickly prioritize Conversion Rate Optimization
Designing custom landing pages for paid media traffic is quite expensive for you (expensive, not just inconvenient)
The macro-level trends that affect your business are on the decline
In these cases, paid media dollars can be a lost cause. The reason is either you can’t convert that traffic into customers to get an ROI or no reasonable level of paid media will reverse traffic declines at the macro level. So, what do you do in these cases?
Search Engine Optimization
Use this time to double-down on SEO. If macro level trends that affect your business are on the decline, now is the time to pivot with new content optimized for more viable keyword markets. Create new content, optimize and amplify that content to help improve in rankings, and began to rebuild. Now is also a great time to have a soup-to-nuts SEO audit done on your site to ensure no technical issues are impacting your traffic now or in the future.
And more SEO traffic means better bottom-line profitability that you can then use to reinvest back into your .com revenue with paid media. It’s not that you’re giving up on paid media all together, it’s just a matter of prioritizing and resetting.
Conversion Rate Optimization
If conversion rates are your problem, do the housekeeping on your website to get customers from one step to the next all the way down the path to purchase. Start with your homepage for the biggest impact – is your most important message above the fold? Do you have clear and prominent calls to action? Are your products showcased and put into context for visitors that don’t already know who you are? Don’t stop there. Evaluate your category pages, your product pages, your cart page and your checkout page. We’re big fans of Hotjar to get some first-hand views into what areas of the site users are getting stuck on.
And when the time is right, you fire that paid media back up and go after that much improved ROI. Need help prioritizing your media mix? We’re here for you: hello@makadigital.com
