10 Ways to Improve Conversion Rate for PPC and Google Ads
When you start using Google Ads or PPC, you need to go in with a strategy. If no thought goes into a plan, you could be wasting your potential investment. There are a ton of effective ways to up your game. The best way to do this is to use an SEO services company. Affordable SEO service does exist, but you may not yet have the budget to hire the professionals.
What does Conversion Mean Anyway?
Conversion can mean many things. Essentially, you’ll have a goal in mind that you want to achieve. Sell a product, reach a certain number of views, gain subscribers, and so on. Get any of these things to happen, that can be considered a “conversion.” So, your conversion rate is measuring how effective you are at consistently hitting your goals. Google Ads is one format in which advertisers pay to display ads.
We want to understand how to use these ads more effectively. Our goal is to use ads to reach whatever our final goal is. Ultimately taking someone viewing an ad and turning it into a conversion. That is the basic principle of conversion rates. Now let us discuss some strategy.
Track Your Conversions
To reach any form of improvement, you first need to be aware of how your ad strategy is doing. If you don’t know the details, how can you identify what is working, or not? There are lots of tools available online to follow your metrics. They will help you break down all the finer points of each ad. Things like overall performance, where visitors are seeing ads, and the changes over time.
You should also try to track anything outside of your usual channels. Any leads you generate should be counted as well. Conversions can go beyond sales. They can include potential sales, generating interest, starting a discussion, or other forms of opportunity. Dig through all the analytical data at your disposal. You need to have an intimate understanding of everything that can be a sign of growth. Then you can start to analyze your performance, and figure out what needs to do.
Match Up Pages with Ad Content
If the content of your ads is good at getting viewers to click, then fantastic, that is half the job. Once they move over to the landing page, they need to be greeted with related content to what captured their interest in the first place. Otherwise, it is easy to see why this comes off as very misleading and only guaranteed to hurt your conversions.
You are investing resources in these ads, so use them wisely. Take time to design interesting content on both ends. Showing viewers something of value in the ad, and then providing the solution, product, or answer on the page is critical. It will boost your quality rating, and increase the likelihood of more top search results.
Demonstrating quality also helps reduce the cost of your ad campaign. If you have a good reputation for generating clicks and revenue, it will encourage advertisers to seek you out for more ads.
Experiment and Test Effectively
To maximize your conversion rate, you’ll need to try different techniques and watch how users respond. You can’t predict 100 percent the effectiveness of a plan. Until you implement it and see the results, only then can you be sure.
Part of your strategy should be rotating different elements of your ads and content. Adjust imagery, style, keywords, tone, and whatever else you think is important. The design of all these things has a direct impact on the conversion rate. Some elements will work more effectively than others, and some users will respond to specific choices. Once you notice a pattern that is working better than the rest, go back to the highest performing attributes.
The key here is constant repetition and rotating of factors. One factor may dominate another, but it still needs to be compared to everything else. Likely, it will end up being a mix of styles and strategies, each one outperforming in different ways. Use this information to build the most comprehensive plan.
Work on CTR
The click-through rate (CTR) simply measures how many viewers see an ad and decided to click on it. As you can imagine, this has a very direct correlation to your conversion rate. You’ll need to get clicks in order to get a value.
To make sure you are getting clicks, you need to build ads strategically. Focus on very specific demographics. Understand who the target audience is and provide an exact solution to the need that they have. Place ads in places that will be seen as often as possible. After viewing an ad multiple times, someone is much more likely to click on it. Use keyword matches to get more clicks, and boost the visibility of your ads.
Most of your conversions will start with your CTR. Nailing this down first will set a stronger foundation for success. Research your keywords and implement your data analysis into your ad content for the best results.
Remarketing Tips
The key to remarketing is reintroducing old content to help generate new interest. When you don’t make conversions the first time around, it doesn’t mean that the opportunity is lost. If anything, it just means you need to be more aggressive in your presentation. Repeating ads to previous viewers will remind them of why they clicked on the product in the first place. It is possible something in their situation changed from last time, and they are now ready to make that purchase.
This can be effective because generating new interest is challenging. In the case of remarketing, you know that the interest has already been established before. It is much easier than going in “cold” and trying to build a new consumer from scratch. You can use this strategy across all your other platforms as well. If the cost allows it, retargeting ads have very little to lose. The opportunity to increase your conversion is there, so consider this strategy in the future.
Negative Keywords
As the name implies, negative keywords will help you avoid certain keyword searches. The idea is to disregard any material that may be related to your content, but that you are not currently offering. You can use your same strategies for searching desired keywords to figure out which negative ones to include.
An example of this strategy would be if you are someone who rents out a property. You might want to include negative keywords that involve selling or buying property. This way people who are interested in owning property, and not renting, don’t interfere with your ad campaign. This will help improve your bounce rate also. Since it is likely they will realize your content is not what they needed and leave quickly.
It may also be a good idea to include a generic list of negative keywords regarding any unwanted subject material. Things that involve spam, illegal activity, violence, or inappropriate content. If your ads end up in these kinds of places, you’ll only be paying for it in the end. With time and money. High-quality web traffic is better than poor traffic, even if the numbers are lower overall.
Use Promo Material
You can include the option for promotional extension tools for your Google Ads. These allow you to list any major upcoming deals, sales, or other unique offers you have going on. A discount is often the only thing between you and securing a sale. Experiment with including all your current promotions into your ads. You might be surprised just how effective they can be. Especially with finding new customers.
For longtime supporters, try showing off your loyalty programs. These are another great incentive to help boost your conversion rate and encourage repeat buyers.
Bid Adjustment on Each Platform
Opportunity won’t be equal across every platform. The cost and performance of ads will vary depending on the time, place, and method they are accessed. Use bidding to be more competitive on the highest performing platforms. The same goes for platforms that don’t do as well for you. Don’t overpay for something that doesn’t bring in the returns. Be strategic in how you spread your resources, and watch your returns grow accordingly.
Schedule Ads Better
Most ads will run all day, every day of the year. But is that what you really need? Remember you need to know who your target audience is. They probably won’t be active online all the time. Making sure to push your ads more during peak operating times can help you increase your conversion rate. As we mentioned above, you can adjust your bids accordingly. Combine bid adjustments with better timing. At the very least, lower your bids during poor performance windows, and then increase when you seeing higher conversion.
A strategy is everything in getting conversions. You need to think about the context and details to know exactly how to plan.
Target Locations
The last thing to consider about your target audience is where they are. This can be more crucial to local businesses or any company with multiple physical locations. Still, online businesses have limitations as well. There is a good chance you only have so many shipping capabilities. Targeting ads outside countries that you can reach won’t help you convert any meaningful business. Sure, you could increase your worldwide traffic, but how effective is that in the long run?
During your market analysis, pay attention to the regions you impact the most. Use that as the template for your region-specific targeting. You can often focus on individual cities as well. With that in mind, you have the potential to build a very comprehensive ad targeting plan. Use it to keep up with your conversion rate as effectively as possible.
