What Most People Don’t Understand About PPC
You can’t talk about PPC without talking about conversion rate optimization (CRO). Each time someone clicks your link, you have the opportunity to gain a conversion. Maybe that person will fill out a form, become a subscriber or complete a sale. Whatever the case, conversions are money. On the other hand, any person who clicks on your link and doesn’t convert causes you to lose money. Sure, you can tell yourself that even those who don’t convert have increased brand awareness, but the bottom line is that you’re not making any money this way.
Why Average Conversion Rates are Biased
The trouble that many marketers have when measuring the effectiveness of their PPC campaign is that they don’t know what to aim for when measuring their conversion rate. Perhaps you can relate. What is your average conversion rate? Is it a good one? Is it what you should be aiming for? Unfortunately, we can’t give you a simple answer because it’s entirely relative.
What do we mean by this? It all depends on how much the conversion is worth. Some businesses have a ton of conversions, but if they’re only worth $1, there isn’t much cash to be made, unless there is an overwhelming number of conversions. Other businesses only have a few conversions, but if they’re worth thousands, they’ll be churning out gold.
But that’s not all. The quality of the conversions also matters. If a business is getting a high number of conversions but they’re fraudulent, it’s only going to look good on paper, not in actual numbers. Another business could be getting far less conversions, but if they’re quality ones, they’ll quickly surpass the business boosted by fake conversions.
We hope that this has helped you better understand why narrowing down an ideal conversion rate is complicated. Yes, you want to improve your conversion rate, but comparing it to industry standards or what experts think it should be is inaccurate and limiting.
Thankfully, there are things you can do to boost your conversion rate, and you don’t have to touch your landing pages to do so. Many conversion experts will make small suggestions like switching up the wording and layout of your landing pages, or making the buttons bigger and brighter. But we have more impactful suggestions that will improve your conversion rate and help you reach new visitors.
Let’s talk about some of the ways that you can get over the hump of just being average and take your PPC campaign to the next level.
Make Converting Easy
People are lazy. They don’t want to have to work for things online, and if they get frustrated, they’ll move on to the next business. To avoid losing customers further in the funnel, make converting easy. Maintain a clean, simple design with no distractions. Apply smart use of color, add directional images and remove obstacles during the checkout process.
Keep Things Consistent
Consistency is key. But after looking at your ads for quite some time, you may forget what consistency looks like for your brand. Here’s a quick exercise for you. Take a look at your top performing ad and the landing page it directs to. Does your ad match up with the landing page? If not, you could be over-promising things to visitors and under-delivering when they reach your landing page. Trust us, this isn’t the way to make nice with customers.
People are enticed to click on your ad when it relates to them or they’re interested in learning more, so make sure that your landing page contains the same information as the ad. If not, visitors are likely to bounce off and not trust your ads in the future.
Sweeten the Pot
People love when companies sweeten the deal. It makes them feel like they’re getting a great bargain. It’s okay to lose a little on the front end of the customer relationship because you hope that you’ll make it up over the customer’s lifetime. So don’t be afraid to give a little the first time around. Consider offering free shipping or a discount code that will give people the boost they need to complete the sale.
Track Calls
If you take any orders over the phone, you’d be silly not to use call tracking software. Call tracking helps you better understand what’s driving your conversion rate. Say you have two ads: one has an online-focused call to action and the other has a call-based one. You can easily measure online orders vs phone orders, but call tracking allows you to dig deeper and determine if one ad is generating more than the other.
Reconnect with Remarketing
Remarketing rates are usually positive since this form of marketing works rather well. Remarketing allows you to target people who have visited your website but didn’t convert. But rather than staying satisfied with your remarketing rates, there are ways to improve them.
Start by creating a list of your converting customers and offer them some type of incentive to get them to return, such as free shipping or a discount code. Next, create a custom combination for users who got to your shipping page but didn’t convert. Create ads for these shoppers that includes free or discounted shipping. Use the same approach for visitors who completed certain actions on your site but didn’t convert, such as watching a video. By creating specific ads to try to get people to convert, you can see patterns in what causes people to bounce off.
Separate Mobile
A final piece to remember when increasing conversion rates is to separate mobile from desktop ads. An ad that converts well with computer users may not have the same success with smartphone users. Shoppers are usually at a different part of the funnel when they use their devices, and there are demographic differences to consider as well. Use mobile preferred ads for your mobile audience so that you don’t miss out on valuable conversions.
It’s easy to oversaturate your attention in CRO, but don’t do it. You’ll end up chasing after thin air. Instead, focus on improving high quality conversions so that you’re making more off each one and growing ROI.
