5 Tried & Tested Ways to Optimise Your Brand’s Digital Performance

A marketing team can spend weeks on a rebrand without once opening its own reports or interacting with its internal processes. It sounds like marketing malpractice 101, and that’s because it is. Most of the optimising work costs little or nothing, and all that’s needed is a thorough, routine look under the hood. 

So, here are 5 ways to optimise your digital performance, laid out nicely and clearly.

Read What People Type into the Search Box

Queries for a product discontinued eighteen months ago mean the redirect never happened, and somebody is looking at an empty results page where a bestseller used to be.

The misspellings matter more than they look. Customers type what they have heard in a shop or from a friend, so a jewellery brand selling a pavé bracelet will find pave, pav and pavay in its log, and all of those belong in the on-page copy where the search engines can reach them.

Delete More Pages Than Get Published

Search Console has a pages report that most brands never acknowledge. Sorting it by impressions and removing everything with almost no clicks over six months yields an inventory of dead ends.

Very little of that should be deleted outright. The workable version involves finding the one good page each weak page relates to, moving anything useful into it, then redirecting the rest. A Performance Marketing Agency will be able to partition what’s useful from what’s detrimental. 

Let the Person Who Wrote the Ad Write the Landing Page

The ad and the page it points at are frequently written by two people who have never spoken. The ad promises next-day delivery on orders placed before 3 pm, and the page opens with a line about a family business founded in 1987.

Whoever writes the hook should write the top of the destination, in the same voice, making the same promise, with the delivery cut-off in the first sentence rather than a footer icon strip. 

Steal the Angles from the Reviews

Trustpilot and the on-site reviews amount to a free copy bank. And guess what? Not every bad review is a bad review. Angle them effectively, and you could have a new USP on your hands.

Let’s put our imagination to the test. A skincare brand runs an ad for months, built on a line taken straight from a two-star review in which a customer complained that the pump releases too much product per press. That customer meant it as a fault; the wider audience, if positioned properly, could hear value for money if the copywriting illustrates it as such.

Turn Something Off for a Fortnight

Branded search and affiliate both bill for revenue that would have arrived anyway. Finding out how much means switching one of them off across three or four comparable regions for a fortnight, keeping it live everywhere else, then comparing total revenue rather than the reporting inside the platform being tested.

Brands that run this against their affiliate programme can sometimes discover they have been paying commission to voucher-code extensions that fire at the checkout, long after the customer has chosen everything in the basket. Others switch off a display campaign expecting no change and watch overall sales fall, which is the more useful outcome and the harder one to explain to whoever wanted the campaign cut.

Whoever runs the test should write down beforehand which result would change the plan, because the temptation once the numbers arrive is to explain them away and carry on.

Why This Work Gets Ignored

None of it appears on a PowerPoint presentation, because presentations get made from things that can be procured, and there’s nothing here to procure.

What a good ol’ performance optimisation needs instead is somebody prepared to spend an afternoon (or two) reviewing material the business already owns but has never properly interrogated, followed by another afternoon spent persuading a manager that the work is not optional. Good luck.