Reports show that small businesses spend between $9,000 and $10,000 on Google ads per month. That’s a lot of money to afford to make costly mistakes. And, yet, we see it all the time with our clients.
They are so focused on getting clicks that they lose sight of their real goal. Don’t get us wrong: you definitely want potential customers to come across your ads, find them useful and click on them. But, if your page doesn’t convert too, then you are just throwing money at Google with no real results to show for.
That’s where conversion rate optimization (CRO) can make a big difference. In this article, we’ll tell you how CRO can help you get the most out of your PPC advertising efforts.
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What Is Conversion Rate Optimization and How Does It Work?
Conversion rate optimization refers to the actions and tools a business uses to optimize its search ads, landing pages, website and increase conversion rates. The goal is that the highest percentage possible of people that land on your page to convert into customers.
It makes sense to focus on conversion rate optimization if you want to make your PPC campaigns profitable. The more people convert, the bigger the boost in sales.
Let’s look at the numbers for a second and imagine that one of your top-selling products cost $100. You have a conversion rate of 3%, meaning that your average gross revenue is $300,000. That’s not bad at all but imagine now that you can increase your conversion rates to 10%. That would mean a gross revenue of $10,000,000. Now, that’s a lot of money!
Google Ads isn’t only about driving traffic, but focusing on the prospects you already have and capitalizing on them.
How to Use CRO to Boost Your Pay-Per-Click Advertising
There are several tricks you can use to optimize your conversion rate and make the most of your Google Ads.
● Focus on Improving User Experience
Let’s go through the basics of Google advertising for a second. If you want to have your ads shown to the right people, then you need a high-quality Score. In other words, you need the compelling ad copy, relevant keywords, and an easy to navigate landing page. And, while most businesses understand the importance of good as copy and highly-targeted keywords, a lot of them seem to ignore the difference a well-designed landing page can make. We’ve seen countless clients link to their homepage, thinking that this strategy will increase drive traffic, increase click-through rates and boost conversion. Usually, the opposite happens: a potential customer will leave the page frustrated that he can’t find what was promised in the ad.
There’s a lot of testing that goes into creating a highly converting landing page. You will have to tweak the content and its format, the headline, and images too before you can see an increase in conversion of statistical significance. But the effort is well worth it.
● Lead Quality Matters More Than Quantity
There’s only so much you can do to put your Google ads in a good position in the search engine results. You use the keywords relevant to your audiences’ search query, write actionable copy, and link the ad to a user-friendly landing page. Then, it becomes a matter of optimizing these elements to drive better results. And, by that, we don’t necessarily mean increasing the number of prospects that come across your ad and click on it, but the quality of your leads.
CRO enables you to make changes that will not only attract the right audience but also provide you with insights that you can then use to boost your conversion rates. Something as simple as removing pricing from your landing page could increase the number of prospects who fill out a form to ask for a quote, thus enabling your sales team to engage with them and compel them to choose your services.
● Use Chatbots on High Performing Landing Pages
Customers nowadays want quick access to the information they need. They don’t like to sit through long sales pitches or waste their time looking for what interests them. That’s why you should try to make your highest performing landing pages, such as pricing or product page as concise and helpful as possible.
But, there’s one more tool you can use to keep leads engaged and make them convert: chatbots. For example, anytime a user spends more than a minute on one of these pages, then a chatbot will automatically pop up, providing help and answering any questions the prospect may have.
● Look at the Right Metrics
Conversion rate optimization is not a guessing game and it will only work if you know what metrics to analyze. If you are making changes to your landing page, then you will want to know how these tweaks affected the average time on page, bounce rate, page views, page load time, ROI, and so on. You should check your Google Analytics as often as you do your social media pages.
Here’s an example: let’s say that you want to increase the amount of time prospects spend on your landing page. So, you improve the navigation and sprinkle links like breadcrumbs to encourage click-through rates. You could also add compelling CTAs and thought-provoking headlines to intrigue visitors and keep them reading. Create different variations and A/B test them to see which one drives the best results.
Over to You
We won’t sugarcoat it in any way: CRO takes a lot of work. But, once you’ve figured out and cracked down the data, it turns paid search into a money-making machine.
Here’s the good news: you don’t have to do all this by yourself. At Australian Internet Advertising, you can find a team of digital marketers who like nothing more than learning, experimenting, and creating profitable PPC campaigns. We use some of the best conversion optimization tools on the market to collect data and base our strategy on facts and figures, not guesses.
If you are not happy with the results of your pay-per-click advertising endeavour, then get in touch with you and let’s start working on a strategy that will drive up sales, not drain your marketing budget.
Call us now.
