Not only is spending a portion of your marketing budget on landing pages beneficial to your bottom line, there’s a way to predict how much you should be spending to optimize your Cost Per Acquisition (CPA).
And today I’ll share that with you.
Conversion Economics
Today I’ll expose exactly how much of your marketing oyster should be shucked off on those slippery little suckers we call landing pages.
(If I’ve got you thinking of the scene in Pretty Woman where Julia Roberts flips a snail off the table, then you know I’m adequately controlling your thoughts).
How much of your marketing budget should you spend on creating and optimizing landing pages?
According to information from Omniture (a world leader in web analytics), you can achieve a 25% improvement in conversion rate by using a promotion-specific, standalone landing page (vs. sending paid search visitors to your homepage).
Assumptions: Taking 25% as our base conversion improvement value, let’s also set $10,000 as our monthly marketing campaign budget.
Reducing Your Cost Per Acquisition (CPA)
Our goal is to analyze the effect of taking a portion of the monthly marketing spend and using it to pay someone (anyone really) for the purpose of conversion rate optimization (CRO).
If you assume that 100% of the budget is spent on generating traffic via paid search (Google AdWords in this example), what happens when you reduce that amount? Obviously the traffic will drop in direct proportion to the drop in budget.
Now, what if you spend 10%, 20%, 30% of your budget on optimizing your landing page instead of paying for traffic? In this case, 10% equates to $1,000, which will buy you a couple of days of concerted effort toward improving your landing page.
What effect will this have on your average CPA?
Finding Your Sweet Spot
The table below shows what happens when you start taking cash away from traffic to put into improving your conversion rate through optimization strategies, and how much money you should be throwing in this direction.
| Campaign Budget | Conversion Costs | PPC Spend | CPC1 | Visitors | Conversion Rate2 | New Customers | CPA |
| $10,000 | $0 | $10,000 | $0.40 | 25,000 | 1.00% | 250 | $40 |
| $10,000 | $1,000 | $9,000 | $0.40 | 22,500 | 1.25% | 281.25 | $35.56 |
| $10,000 | $2,000 | $8,000 | $0.40 | 20,000 | 1.50% | 300 | $33.33 |
| $10,000 | $3,000 | $7,000 | $0.40 | 17,500 | 1.75% | 306.25 | $32.65 |
| $10,000 | $4,000 | $6,000 | $0.40 | 15,000 | 2.00% | 300 | $33.33 |
1 Average cost per click according to Google
2 Estimated conversion improvement of a successful test. Note: these numbers are also based on a diminishing percentage improvement per dollar spent. (25% initial increase by using a landing page followed by a compounded rate that bumps conversions by 25%, but is really only a 20% overall improvement in the second level – 25/125 equates to a 20% improvement).
What does this tell us?
What these numbers say is threefold:
- Spending a portion of your marketing budget on Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) will yield a lower cost per acquisition for each customer.
- There is a limit (or sweet spot) to how much cash you should allocate into this endeavor.
- In this example the sweet spot occurs when you are spending 30% of your budget on optimization. Spend any more and the CPA climbs as the loss in traffic catches up.
Finding the sweet spot for your CPA…
Your own private sweet spot (?) will depend on how successful your CRO efforts are, perhaps you’ll only achieve a 5% increase per $1,000 spent. The only difference is that you’ll have a different chart and a different sweet spot. The important thing to learn here is that there does exist a point where you optimize your expenditure based on optimization efforts.
Find your sweet spot and you find the key to a minimized CPA.
Now ain’t that sweet!
