How to run PPC and CRO to send your sales into overdrive

Sharing a task is often the way to get the best results. That’s why the most successful digital marketing campaigns are usually integrated.

CRO is no different. A great CRO implementation will help you make more sales from your website traffic. Which is a great start, but why stop there? Once your website is converting and generating serious sales, doesn’t it make sense to increase your traffic an make even more sales?

CRO and PPC are a great starting point to build an integrated campaign that significantly increases your digital revenue. Both tactics require a similar data-driven strategic approach, so the two can naturally improve each other.

The benefits of running an integrated PPC and CRO campaign.

Richer, more comprehensive data.

To start with, PPC and CRO both require a strong understanding of the desired user. Data from each campaign can be used to build a better picture of the audience, and how they react to different marketing elements.
Because analytics is pivotal to both CRO and PPC, sharing it for both tactics will help you build a better quality of data that can be used to improve the result of both campaigns.

Strategic, targeted traffic.

When you’re running a CRO test, you want consistent traffic. PPC allows you to target the users you send to your page, allowing you to test the performance of different design and copy elements for a particular audience segment.
Using PPC to drive traffic to your page during the testing period will also help you reach a statistically significant conclusion in a shorter time frame. Unlike SEO, PPC allows you to generate ongoing traffic in a controlled manner to ensure you hit the numbers you need during your testing phase. As a result, you’ll have more relevant data, in a quicker time frame to help improve the results of your CRO implementation.

Shared learnings.

Both CRO and PPC focus on the same goal, conversions, so results from one can be a good indicator for the other. Copy or designs that get more clicks in your PPC campaign are likely to get more conversions on your landing page too.
Often, finding the key to success for one tactic increases your chance of success in the other. So that means when you find your winning combinations, you can really cash in on them.

Shared success.

Ultimately, the performance of users on a site will also impact the quality score of your PPC campaign. Landing pages that aren’t optimised to convert will lead to a lower quality score and more expensive PPC campaigns.
On the other hand, great conversion rates mean more of the traffic you bring to the website turns into sales, so you can generate more leads, at a lower cost-per-acquisition and generate significant improvements in ROI.

What to avoid when integrating PPC and CRO.

To make PPC and CRO work together, integration is key. Running them at the same time without making them work together can stop you getting the sales you want to see. Here are some things to look out for:

Incorrect PPC destination pages.

Both PPC and CRO rely on a series of A/B tests. If you’re running your campaigns separately, you could be sending people to pages that don’t match the ads they see.
Sending people to irrelevant pages increases the cost of your PPC campaign and can skew the results of testing for your CRO campaign.

Inconsistent PPC messaging.

Because PPC is agile and fast-moving, it can be tempting to switch messaging drastically throughout a campaign. CRO, on the other hand, requires more data to reach statistical significance. If you frequently change the messaging of your PPC, you may make it difficult to track the performance of your CRO A/B test.

Conflicting results.

Most of the time, the crossover for PPC and CRO will mean that there is a good correlation between what works on each channel. Unfortunately, there may be cases where the two channels give different, conflicting results. It’s not a terrible thing, but it may mean your campaign takes longer to be fully optimised. Ultimately, the results are worth the wait.

Rose-tinted traffic.

Because traffic from PPC is targeted, they’re more likely to convert. Your broader website traffic is made up of a more unpredictable mix, some of whom have no interest in making a purchase. It’s important to remember this when planning your A/B tests so you can segment your audience and understand how different traffic streams react.

The bottom line.

To get the best of PPC and CRO you need to run them together with a proper strategy. If you run them as separate campaigns, you may negatively impact the results of both.
When you dp successfully integrate them, they compliment each other fantastically. You can gather more data, generate more traffic (and spend less money to generate that traffic) and turn more of that traffic into sales.