5 practical tips to decrease your CPA

The average cost-per-acquisition varies a lot from industry to industry, but no matter what type of business you’re in, and no matter the social network you’re advertising on, acquiring customers for less will always be a goal. The less you spend on getting new customers, the greater your margin.

But if lowering your cost-per-acquisition (CPA) is the goal, actually getting there can be a challenge. You probably have an upper limit for your CPA, but there are so many variables to your online ads, it can be hard to know where to begin to get that cost even lower. Achieving a lower CPA can mean trying different strategies and taking some risks.

If you’re ready to switch things up to try to achieve a better ROI, here are some of our favorite tips to lower your CPA and get more out of your online ads spend.

Check your targeting

The first thing you can do is to check up on your ad settings to determine what is working and where you could do better. There are a number of different variables you can dive into and test out to lower your CPA. If you’re running ads in several different locations, for example, check your performance across those geographic zones compared to what you think it should be. You may want to change the geographic scope of your ads depending on what you find.

Similarly, check your audience. Are your ads performing better with certain age groups or genders? What about device targeting? Maybe your ads perform better on mobile than on desktop. You can optimize around all these variables to bring down your CPA.

Check your ad schedule

The time of day and day of the week your ads are being delivered can have a big impact on how they perform. When are your ads generating the most conversions? And what is your cost per conversion at different moments? Closely observing these things will help you ensure that your customers are seeing your ads when it matters the most.

Pause underperforming ads

Keep a close eye on whether or not your ads are performing well. You’ll want to make sure you’re reaping the benefits of your ads. If you notice that the ads you’re running aren’t generating profits or paying for themselves, pause them! There’s no sense in spending your budget on underperforming ads.

Get actionable recommendations with AI

There are also a lot of things you can automate in your campaigns to decrease your CPA. And automation can both be super effective and free up your time for more interesting and complex tasks.

AI recommendations in Paragone automatically deliver actionable insights on how you can scale your campaigns, save money, and optimize your ads. Our AI tool analyzes data from all of your ad accounts to find opportunities for actionable growth, both positive trends to reinforce and negative trends to fix. For each cross-network recommendation, our AI suggests solutions so you can make your own decision and implement it. The power stays with you, and you stay in control to make the final decision on any given recommendation.

Set up automatic rules

Using Paragone automation rules, you can also choose to optimize your campaigns around certain specific elements to decrease your CPA. You can automate plenty of things. Pause campaigns, ad sets, or ads after they have reached a specific spend value. Or, automate around your KPIs. Automation rules can be a huge time saver!

Paragone will also keep you informed, notifying you if your CPA is too elevated, for example. This way, you won’t miss a beat—or overspend—on campaigns that aren’t performing well.