In paid search advertising, conversions are king - it is a direct action medium, pushing users to immediate sales. There is such a wealth of data available, so you can see exactly how much you’ve made for each pound or dollar spent. This means that, even if you see huge volumes of traffic being driven to your site - if they ain’t converting, you ain’t winning.
Luckily, there are a few strategies you can implement to turn your PPC campaigns into all-singing, all-dancing, all-converting machines. In this blog, we will explore a smorgasboard of these tactics (5 of them, in fact, for those of you who were paying attention) so buckle up, and get ready to start converting!
Land In Style
The beauty of PPC advertising is that, in general, you can pick the exact page on your site that a user is going to land. Conversely, with SEO tactics, you are somewhat reliant on the voodoo magic of Google’s algorithms. This manifests itself into two important strategies you can utilise when selecting your landing pages (and, yes, I realise I’ve gone two-for-one on this point):
Firstly, ensure the landing page you have chosen for an ad or keyword is as relevant as possible to the search query it will show for. If a user is looking for hoodies, will landing them on a generic ‘tops’ page suffice, or can you break it down and send them to a hoodie-specific page instead? Granularity will win the day for you here.
Secondly, ensuring any landing page in use is as conversion-optimised as possible will further drive up that precious conversion rate. Can the user convert immediately on the landing page? Is it clear how to access the cart and complete the transaction process? These are important questions to ask yourself when deciding on whether to use a certain page in your PPC campaigns. You can even go one step further and create PPC-specific landing pages for your campaigns that are hyper-optimised to drive conversions.
Quality Over Quantity
As mentioned in the introduction, driving massive volumes of traffic means nothing if you don’t see the sales off the back of it. The quality of this traffic is absolutely critical in ensuring you see a healthy conversion rate. The easiest way to improve the standard is to put in place a solid set of negative keywords to ensure you are not matching to irrelevant terms. Using the aforementioned example, if you were bidding on “hoodies” as a phrase match keyword and saw a large amount of traffic coming from the search term “Nike hoodies” despite not stocking Nike, then you would look to add “Nike” as a negative keyword to prevent paying for this irrelevant traffic to land on your site.
Alongside negatives, being smart with the match types of keywords you are adding to your account can also help improve traffic quality. Over-reliance on broad and broad match modified can result in large volumes of irrelevant clicks, therefore, it is important to build up a solid repertoire of long-tail, exact match keywords to ensure your ads are always showing alongside appropriate searches.
Match Your Messages
In addition to making sure you have the appropriate, relevant landing page, ensuring that the tone of your ad creative matches what you have on your site is key. This consistency creates a smoother journey for the user from first click to conversion.
Take The Right (Conversion) Path
This point isn’t so much about increasing your conversions, more how to ensure you are measuring it as effectively as possible. The days of simply thinking about the last click in a conversion pathway are dead. With all the data available at the fingertips of digital marketeers,it is important to consider the various touch points a user makes in their conversion journey. The most simple example of this is when a user initially searches for a generic term, clicks your ad, leaves and then returns after searching for a brand term. If you simply look at the last click, you will massively overestimate the conversion rate of your brand terms, and devalue the generic terms that could actually be driving new customers to your site.
Play To The Audience
There are a few ways you can leverage audiences to help ramp up your conversion rate. Use of RLSAs (remarketing list for search ads) should, pretty much, be a given for any savvy Google Ads user. These lists allow you to up- or down-weight bids based on specific user behaviours on your site, meaning you can specifically push your ads to the top of the page for users who are a more likely to convert. A good example of this would be with cart abandoners who you know just need a little nudge to get them over the line. If you push bids on generic terms for them, then they will be more likely to see one of your ads, return to your site and complete the purchase.
Google has also rolled out their in-market audiences which allow you to specifically target users who Google deems to be in the market for specific products. This adds another way you can narrow down your audience to target only those who are most likely to convert.
Whether you’re just starting out or are a PPC wizard, improving on conversion rate is something everyone can aspire to do. The tips listed above will help set you on the way to doing this but if you would like to push it to the max, why not get in touch with the PPC experts here at Eastside Co.
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