How Do I Increase Conversions?

You should only be running ads in they bring in new leads and sales, so why aren’t conversions just sales and leads. Well we think that’s the only definition of a conversion – a direct sale or solid lead. End of discussion, fire your vendor if they think time on site or over 3 pages viewed is a conversion. Amateurs.

Your conversion rate in Google Ads, Facebook or Bing is your success rate at turning clicks on your ads into an actual lead or sale.

According to WordStream the average conversion rate for a Google Search campaign is just 4.4%. So you’re paying for a lot of clicks that don’t convert. But typically the campaigns we manage see a much higher percentage, ranging from 15% to even 40% in some cases.

WordStream also state that the average cost per conversion on Google Search is currently $56.11, and on the Google Display Network it is $90.80. So it’s important to go in to an ad campaign with an appropriate budget in the first place.

Do You Even Have Conversion Tracking Set Up?

Amazingly, about 60% of Google, Bing and Facebook Ads accounts don’t have working tracking, even worse, about 80% of those accounts are optimized for conversions… so how can that work?

Well the answer is that it doesn’t! 

The best conversions actually mean something and have a value attached. My favorite way to ensure you have conversions tracking is to us Google Analytics.

Set up a goal for each lead generated, and make sure it has a value. Once you have a goal for each type of lead your website can generate, import these as conversions into Google ads.

How Do I Get More Conversions?

That’s why you’re here. You want to know the ways we get more conversions for our clients. Here are some of the ways:

Improve Your Quality Score

Key to everything in PPC is creating an experience for the searcher that is relevant and makes the user confident about the platform you’re advertising on. For example, Google wants to reward the best quality results by offering premium placements at a lower cost. This is the fundamental theory behind Quality Score. 

The Quality Score will require improvements not just in keywords and ads but also on the landing page, everything should speak to the intent of the searcher. We are trying to speak to a very small segment of the population – those only ready to sign up or buy your product or service.

We achieve improvements by regularly monitoring keywords, changing ad copy and adding negative keywords on terms that don’t align with the intent of the searcher.

Narrow Your Audience

You don’t want your ad to show to just anyone – only your perfect customers. Unless you have money to waste that is. 

Some ways to narrow your focus is to use exact match long tail keywords. Once you have data, you can only run the exact match keywords that lead to conversions, this will make your conversion rate skyrocket!

Another trick is to use audiences – these can be made up of customer lists, in-market audiences or a mixture of both. 

Optimize Your Landing Page

What use is a perfect ad, with the perfect targeting, if the destination doesn’t match. Make sure your landing page has a clear CTA above the fold, the offer is enticing and the page is visually appealing.

It’s more than just the look and feel though – the page has to load quickly and have an SSL certificate. (That means the url starts with https).

You should regularly A/B test your page too, something as small as the color of the CTA can affect your conversion rate.

Testing is almost always a good thing… so do it!

Shut Off Non Converting Terms

Finally, it seems obvious, but you’d be surprised how often we see it, shut off the search terms that aren’t converting!

You can pause any keywords that have not converted, then use the search term report to add high converting terms as new keywords, and also add negative keywords from the terms that don’t convert, but still cost you money.

If you follow all of these steps, you’ll be on the way to more conversions and a more optimized spend. If you don’t have the time – that’s why we’re here! Call us today for help.