Over the past ten years, I’ve been struggling to find a term that truly defines what it is we can do for our clients. We’ve tried terms such as ACR (aka acquisition, conversion, retention) but that described our process to online marketing more than it did the benefits. We also tried going after specific optimization terms (search engine optimization, ppc campaign optimization, conversion optimization, etc) but that approach always left us too niche and “type-cast” with our clients when we could do so much more for them beyond these single services. Now more and more, however, I have been speaking about “profit optimization” and have come to realize that this not only accurately describes what we can do for our clients but it is the future of our Industry.
So what exactly is profit optimization? Profit optimization, simply put, is where you boost your return on investment by coordinating your search data with your conversion/sales data . In other words, not all conversions are created equal. Some conversions will actually cost you money while others will generate healthy returns. Yet, all this time, we’ve been allocating equal priority to every conversion. With profit optimization, however, we can start making better choices about our marketing thresholds and spends.
So how do you start profit optimizing? Here are some tips:
- Establish a way to integrate search data with conversion data so you know which keyword drove the sale. Some simple ways to do this involve custom tags, unique phone number tracking, and dynamically generated landing pages. A more advanced way of doing this is through automatic data sync’s via API’s.
- Improve your reporting so that you know which conversion are of high value and which ones are of lesser quality. This is an extra step but the most crucuial. For example, a high value sale may have cost three times as much to acquire but the ROI is much better. The only way to know this is with this extra data point.
- Optimize your campaigns -Now that you have these critical technologies and reporting pieces in place, you can now make better decisions optimizing your SEO, PPC, and Online Advertising campaigns, your conversion optimization campaigns, and your retention campaigns. Once you know the high value targets, you can aggressively go after them, while minimizing the spends on the lower value ones.
While we are excited about all of the changes happening in the online space, we are most excited about profit optimization. Here, we finally get to the root of what online marketing is all about – the bottom line – and now we have the tactics and the technologies to make this a reality for all clients.
Tags: conversion optimization, online marketing, Profit optimization, SEO
