Think You Need a Bigger Budget? Try These 3 Conversion Fixes First
A common trap many businesses fall into is when they find out an ad converts they believe they should immediately increase the budget. While increasing the budget may increase sales, it’s not always the most effective way to grow.
Often improving the conversion rate delivers far greater returns for the same budget.
For example, if your cost per acquisition (CPA) is £10, a £100 spend would bring in 10 new customers. But if you doubled your conversion rate, you could gain 20 customers for the same £100, doubling your results without increasing your spend.
You can explore how factors like budget, click-through rate, and conversion rate work together to affect your overall revenue using the Transparent Digital Services Conversion Calculator.
The Purchase Journey
Every customer moves through three key stages:
- Awareness
- Consideration
- Conversion.
Each stage plays a vital role in turning a casual viewer into a paying customer, and each offers its own opportunity for optimisation. By improving performance at each step: from capturing attention to building trust and driving conversion; you can significantly boost results without increasing your budget.
This article explores three practical “hacks” to optimise every stage of the journey and maximise your return on ad spend.
Awareness: From Ad to Product
The first stage of the purchase journey is awareness, where you must capture the customer’s attention. Success depends on understanding the platform you’re advertising on, and accurately finding your target audience; monitoring how they interact with content on the specific platform.
TOP TIP: What works on TikTok may not suit advertising on LinkedIn, so the creative must match the tone of the platform and how the target audience interacts in that space.
Make use of in-platform tools like Ad Relevance Score, Ad Strength, or Keyword Quality Score in Google Ads to gauge how well your ad aligns with your audience’s interests, these often-overlooked metrics offer direct insight into performance.
Track how each creative performs in-platform and split test variations with the goal of lifting your click-through rate.
TOP TIP: For video ads, try combining the strongest hook (the clip that keeps viewers watching past three seconds) with the content that converts best – creating the ideal mix of attention-grabbing and results-driven content.
Consideration – From Product to Basket
Most conversion drop-offs happen in the transition from viewing the product to adding it to the basket. While technical issues like broken elements and clunky interfaces. Product presentation also plays a role. The messaging should be concise with the marketing message with the customer avatar, with clear value propositions.
Page performance also plays a crucial role. Slow load times and poor mobile optimisations can quickly lose the interest of potential buyers.
TOP TIP: A practical trick is to complete the purchase journey yourself, take screenshots and upload them to ChatGPT for an unbiased view. This will uncover small issues to move the needle with conversion rate percentiles.
Conversions – From Basket to Purchase
This is where intent becomes action, and is often where the most valuable opportunities are found. Users who have added products to their basket fall into a golden audience, as they have strong purchase intent. This is where accurate tracking comes into play.
TOP TIP: By using first-party data, you can retarget users effectively, and exclude purchasers to hone in on this funnel. This is one of the most powerful tools in lifting conversion rates. this one trick in terms of retargeting engaged ‘add to basket’ users, is such a simple, yet often overlooked part of increasing conversion rates.
Naturally the checkout process needs to be as smooth as possible, and ideally you are:
- Offering multiple payment options. With so many payment options available, users tend to gravitate towards their preferred payment method. If this isn’t available at our checkout then this can be a barrier preventing purchase.
- Integrating systems like stripe or ShopPay, can drastically reduce the effort needed for users to input information, which in-turn increases conversion rates.
- Reducing the steps required to complete purchase.
The smoother your experience, the higher your conversion rate. The small differences here can deliver the biggest results.
Key Takeaways:
While there are countless ways to optimise conversion rates, these three focus areas: awareness, consideration, and conversion, often deliver the most immediate and measurable gains.
By improving performance at each stage, you can significantly increase your return on ad spend without increasing your budget.
