Increasing Conversion On Pay Per Click Ads
By Sujan Patel with 2 Comments
Improving conversion on your pay per click campaign is more or less trial and error. The following are often overlooked tips that will help increase conversion for your pay per click campaign:
1. Competition
Look at your competitor’s ads and landing page, then compare it to your own. Notice anything different? By studying your competitors, you learn two things: what you are doing wrong and what you can do to stand out.
2. Relevancy
Use the right keywords. A lot of websites forget that the keywords that they are using might not be the keywords actually used by potential customers. Pay a professional to do keyword research, or do it yourself, but this is the most important step. You can have the best ad and most optimized landing page, however if you go after the wrong keywords then your ads aren’t going to convert. You don’t go to a shoe store to buy groceries and neither do your potential customers. Remember, there’s a reason why they are called Keywords.
3. Simplicity
Make your ad simple and your landing page user friendly. Do not pack your ads with all sorts of information, only have information that is going to compel searchers to click on your ad. Getting visitors to your site is only half the battle, now to make the sale. You turned searchers into visitors and now turn the visitors into customers/users. Use pictures and text on the landing page to describe your product or service. Be simple and focus on the conversion.
4. Target Audience
Which cities are most of your customers coming from? What time of the day do your ads perform best? When and where are your ads converting the least? These are questions you should be asking yourself. More and more search engines are offering geo targeting and day parting. Target your ads to regions that the majority of your customers are located. If there are certain hours of the day where your ads perform better, then use day parting. For example, a lot of people move to Florida when they retire and older people are generally up earlier. Therefore, if I’m selling wheelchairs I would geo target the Florida region and increase my spending during the earlier hours of day (also decrease spending during the later hours). This will increase your conversion rate and lower costs as well.
5. Call to Action
This is the last part of the sale, the call to action. Whether your action is buying a product/service or having the customer contact you via email/phone, it is important that this call to action stands out and is in clear view. Bolding and using distinct colors can help your call to action stand out. Have the call to action above the fold. Do not do make the visitor have to figure out how to contact you.
6. Test
Don’t just make changes and walk away. Track it and test it. Many people will read tips like these, make the changes recommended and walk away thinking there conversion is going to increase just because they followed a few suggestions. Wrong! If only it was that easy. Test different changes you make to your campaign. For example, if you’re putting your phone number on your text ad, then make that one change and wait, while carefully watching your analytics, to see if it improves your conversion. If it does, great…continue on with more improvements. If your conversion doesn’t increase, don’t worry, because what does well for some niches might not work for you niche.
Example: circuitcity.com
Keyword: Printer
This is the perfect example of what not to do.
Let’s say I was looking for a printer. I would search using the keyword “printerâ€. I scan the page and I see “Printers at Circuit Cityâ€, I know and trust Circuit City so I read the rest of the ad “Circuit City – Official Site Free Shipping on Orders $24 and Upâ€. Okay, that’s cool, if I buy a printer from here I’ll probably get free shipping so click on the ad. Good job Circuit City (so far).
I land on this page. I look at the site for about .5 milliseconds and I am lost. I did not find printers after another quick scan. Where oh where are the printers? I Ctrl + F the site and finally find printers down on towards the lower part of the page.
Now this is not what you want to do. I was searching for a printer and I liked Circuit City’s ad, so I clicked on it with hopes of finding a printer, but no…I landed on this page. This page is so cluttered that I lost interest immediately and they paid for a visitor, but lost the customer. I noticed HP.com also makes this mistake. So guys, fire your internet marketing company and give me a call. I’ll even do it for free.
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THANK YOU! This is very practical and useful information. I am a freelance business journalist (formerly from the US and Canada) working in Europe. In the next year or so I am going to self-publish a book to help early-stage growth companies in the US and Canada find in the European capital markets the growth capital they need to take their businesses in the US and Canada to the next stage. (The European markets have NOT shut smaller companies out of the IPO market.) When I do that, I am REALLY going to need to put this kind of (excellent) advice to work.
http://www.MediaBistro.com/RegCrowder