Pay-per-click programs, such as Google Ads, are becoming increasingly popular. They give small businesses the opportunity to advertise on the same platform as the big boys. PPC programs create a level playing field where your success is down to your effort and not the size of your budget.
However, PPC is not an easy way to make money. Because of the low barrier to entry, there is a lot of competition and to make a profit you need to test and hone your campaigns for maximum effect. Here are six ways you can increase your conversion rates on Google Ads.
1. Never Forget Remarking
Do you track how many people click on your ads and add your product to their cart, but eventually decide not to make a purchase? There could be hundreds of reasons why these people decided to not purchase the product at the very last moment. You may never know the exact reason why. However, just because they have not purchased anything from your store, it does not mean that you should ignore them. Rather, target these people with r emarketing. Cook up a unique ad copy for these people based on their preferences and then create a remarking list and voila!
2. Don’t Ignore The Relation Between the Landing Page and Ad Copy
Sometimes people get carried away while writing ad copies for their Google Ads campaign. You need to understand that Google Ads use certain metrics and algorithms to determine the quality and relevancy of an ad before showing it to people in related search queries. This means your ad copy must contain those keywords that you are planning to target and also the landing page copy needs to contain those keywords as well. Otherwise, it will be very hard for the Google Bot to understand the relation between the search queries, ad copy and landing page. Moreover, it will be confusing for the visitors if they are unable to find any relation between the ad copy and the landing page. Imagine running an ad that highlights the importance of Digital Marketing but the landing page talks about the Importance of web design. It will be a total disaster. Conversion rate, in that case, will take a nosedive.
3. Ad Rank
We marketers get so busy writing compelling ad copy and tracking conversion that we tend to forget the elephant in the room, which is Ad Rank. Google Ads uses this metric to determine the position of an ad related to others. If you have stopped paying attention to Ad Rank, your ads will not get shown. There are a number of factors that determine Ad Rank and the most crucial of them all are the landing page experience, relevance of the ads, expected click through rate, searcher’s intent, nature of the search terms, ad extensions, auction-time ad quality and bid amount. Since Ad Rank gets calculated every time an ad gets qualified to appear in a search term, you have the opportunity to tinker with the ad copy, keywords or the landing page. By improving Ad Rank, you will be able to rank higher in competitive terms even without paying extra money. This will have a bigger impact on your business’s bottom-line.
4. Negative Keywords
The most outrageous thing that a Google Ad Specialist can do is not include a list of potential negative keywords while starting a campaign for the first time. You can’t reply on the search term report alone to get the list of irrelevant keywords. Rather, you need to be proactive and create a list of keywords that are somehow related to your ad copy but are totally irrelevant to your ad campaign. For example, if you are trying to sell ebooks, you need to mark terms such as "free" or "pirated" as negative keywords. Otherwise, a good percentage of your ad budget will be spent on irrelevant search queries and the conversion rate will take a serious hit.
5. Focus on Mobile Users
Love it or hate it, we simply can’t ignore the fact that mobile is seeing a major uptick and this trend is not going to slow down. When you are running an ad campaign, you need to have some extra provisions for mobile users. For example, don’t forget to use the Call Extension specifically for mobile users, and also don’t forget to calculate conversion rate from mobile devices in a separate sheet. Since people are using multiple devices to browse the web, you need to make sure that the landing page of your website is mobile friendly and it is not taking long time to load.
6. Get The Landing Page in Order
People tend to ignore the importance of landing page. They just plaster some images and texts here and there and feel it is okay. You need to make proper use of the "above the fold" space of the landing page. Include catchy lines and a Call to Action Button in that section and don’t forget to conduct A/B tests to figure out which version is generating more revenue. The content of the landing page must be concise, compact, conversion-oriented and catchy.
Include client testimonials and trusted seals to make your landing page look trustworthy. Otherwise, it will be really hard for you to improve the conversion rate.
Additional Thoughts
Only pause keywords once they have had at least a couple of hundred clicks and a handful of conversions. Before this figure is reached, you can’t really be sure how reliable it is. The longer you collect data, the more accurate the results will be.
Borderline Keywords & Data
If a keyword is borderline (e.g., the cost per conversion is $34 and the value is only $32) make a judgment call as to whether you should collect more data before pausing that keyword.
You should regularly be testing your landing pages and sales pages too. Doing this will improve your overall conversion rates and could, therefore, make previously unprofitable keywords profitable. If you run a successful split test on your landing page, it may be worth un-pausing previously borderline keywords to see if they are now profitable.
Just Keep Measuring
Using these stats, you can very easily see which are your most profitable keywords. Analyze them, see if you can use them to think of more keywords to add to your campaign, and then test those keywords too.
There are many ways you can bring down your costs, such as improving your ads or your website. However, using this six methods can help you make a profit quickly. As you accrue more data, you can improve your campaign and website, then gradually un-pause keywords.