There is a process involved with online customer acquisition both on-site and off-site. On-site customer acquisition is the process of converting a visitor, much like someone browsing a shop, into a customer. Off-site acquisition refers to driving individuals to your site and then ultimately converting them into customers.

Customer Acquisition from Start to Finish

Here are the basic steps of acquisition:

• First, online marketing campaigns are created whether from search engine marketing or from display advertising across a network or a specific site.




• Second, optimize the advertisements in an effort to obtain the highest click thru rates (CTR), and also conversion rates by tracking the advertisement through to a conversion. Some networks and search engine marketing interfaces will provide you with code to place on the page after a conversion has taken place. This will let you know which advertisement yielded a conversion.




• Third, landing pages are created in an effort to convert more visitors. Those individuals that respond to the advertisement land at your site. You can choose to have them land on any page within your site or a specific landing page created solely for acquisition.




• Fourth, a call to action on your site or landing pages is crucial. A definite call to action is needed such as signing up for a free trial or possibly taking them to a product page that corresponded to the advertisement. This targeting of the advertisement that obtained the visitor to the page they land on is an effort to better correspond the ad with the page. Relevancy helps to increase the conversion rate.




• Fifth, is to optimize your site and landing pages. You can test one page against another which is known as A/B testing or various parts of a page(s) which is known as multivariate testing. The end goal is to increase your customer acquisition rate.




• Sixth, correlate and test advertisements with landing pages to optimize conversions. It is common practice to run multiple banners or text advertisements while monitoring the click thru rate as a metric and turning off the low click thru rates while continuing the high click thru rates. However that only makes sense if your goal is simply the most traffic at the lowest cost. What you really need to do is test the advertisements with landing pages. If you have 5 advertisements and 5 landing pages you should have 25 tests watching the metric of conversions as opposed to click thru. Ultimately what you want is a conversion and it is not necessarily the highest CTR that yields the lowest cost of acquisition.




• Seven, customer lifetime value can be tracked and optimized for the greatest possible return on investment. While you can optimize for conversions you may really want to optimize your campaigns to run only those that yield the customers who generate the most profit for you over time. This is known as tracking and optimizing for lifetime value.

This is a process and life-cycle that never ends. You can continuously optimize to obtain customers who yield the highest return on investment, ROI, over time. Our services are found here for customer acquisition.

Factors Within Your Control
You could create advertising campaigns and check them once a month, however that would not be in your best interest. There are many variables to take into account with your search engine pay per click campaigns (PPC). You obviously have the advertisements themselves to compare against one another and keywords you are testing. These need to be watched closely so you can make the appropriate adjustments. While these variables are within your control, other variables are not.

Factors Beyond Your Control
There are other factors beyond your control that will effect your campaign. Keywords that you are using may have little competition today and more bidders the next day. Others, potentially your competitors, may have found these keywords as well and are increasing the competition. If you are not watching the words your ads may not obtain the amount of traffic they did prior to the competition.

Aside from your competitors you need to watch the trends of your customers, they can change their search habits and search terms as well. Particularly if a new product, service, or feature has hit the market in your industry then your customers may change their search terms which will dry up your flow of visitors. This is yet another category of search engine marketing optimization to be cognizant of.

Search Engine Marketing Optimization
There are multiple factors within your control such as changing keyword bids, targeting variables, the advertisements themselves, your corresponding landing pages and more, however all need to be watched continuously. Consistent search engine marketing optimization of your campaigns will lead to the best possible return on investment.

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