The Best Strategies for Conversion Optimization in PPC
Irrespective of the type of website that you own, conversions and conversion rate is the top priority for almost every website owner.
For some websites making more sales is a form of conversion while for some generating leads is the ultimate goal.
Conversions are the most important factor when it comes to PPC Marketing because it measures whether your PPC marketing efforts are actually working to improve your ROI and how many leads are you converting into sales.
Conversions may not always indicate a sale but it does indicate that a person took some kind of action that led him further into the conversion funnel.
It is important to keep an eye on the conversions because it helps you to ensure that you are spending your marketing dollars wisely and targeting people who have a potential of converting into customers.
However, sometimes there may be situations when the PPC results are not satisfying and up to the mark. This calls for conversion optimization techniques to bring the performance of the PPC campaigns back on the track.
Here, I’m going to discuss few strategies to optimize your PPC conversions so that you can get long term and profitable results.
1. Use the Right Keyword Match Type
Keyword research process plays a very significant role in achieving your business goals by ensuring that each of your ad is triggered by the right search query.
Keyword match types allows you to improve the search opportunities for your campaigns to give you the most accurate results.
There are 4 different keyword match type to take into account:
(i) Broad Match
This is the default match type keyword. This match type maximizes the exposure of your ads and shows your ads to a wide range of people.
The broad match type keywords display your ads in all search queries that have similar phrases or close variations of your keywords like singular, plural misspellings, etc.
The drawback of broad match type keyword is that due to little restrictions being placed, it makes your ads eligible to appear in irrelevant search queries thereby wasting your ad spend.
It is important to have a regular check on this type of keywords to prevent wastage of ad spend.
However, this type of keyword is a great source for driving a high level of CTR for a new account with no historical data. Also, it is the perfect keyword for your ads to maximize the volume of clicks.
Example: Broad Match Type Keyword is Women’s Formal Hat
Result: Formal Hats for Women, Women’s Red Formal Hat, Formal Hats, Kids Formal Hats
(ii) Modified Broad Match
As the name suggests, this match type is a modified version of broad match type keyword.
It enables you to get more control over your keywords. This means that your PPC ads are excluded from certain irrelevant searches.
In modified broad match, you need to put a “+” sign before each of the keywords because this “+” sign is likely to trigger your ads for more relevant search queries.
With the modified broad modifier, your ads will only appear when the search query will have more close variations.
By using modified broad match type keyword, you can eliminate the probability of non-targeted clicks.
Example: Modified Broad Match Type Keyword is +Women +Formal +Hat
Result: Women Formal Red Hat, Formal Women Hat for Sale, Expensive Formal Women Hat, Formal Hat Store for Women
(iii) Phrase Match
Phrase Match type keywords ensure that your ad appears in the exact same order while there may be other words before or at the end of the phrase.
This gives a higher level of control and accuracy as compared to the broad and modified broad match type keywords.
By increasing the number of relevant clicks it further helps you to increase your conversions.
Phrase Match type keywords are flexible as additional text can be added before or after the phrase without affecting the actual phrase.
Example: Phrase Match Type keyword is “Women Formal Hat”
Result: Women Formal Hat Shop, Women Formal Hat on Discount
(iv) Exact Match
This is the most specific keyword match type to consider and it is used when you want to put maximum control over the display of your ads.
With exact match type keyword your ads will only appear when a person would type exact phrase of your keywords in similar order.
Although the Exact Match Type keywords will result in low search volume, precisely the conversions will be high because the phrase match keywords will only attract highly qualified visitors who are on a verge of converting into customers or who are actively looking for your product.
However, a recent change appeared in the Exact match type keyword that now minor variations would be able to match your exact match type keywords.
Example: Exact Match Type Keyword is [Women Formal Hat]
Result: Women Formal Hat, Formal Women Hat
2. Don’t Forget to Include Negative Keywords
In PPC Marketing this is one of the best and effective strategies to increase conversions.
Negative Keywords are a core component of a successful PPC Keyword list. These are those keywords that prevent your ads from being triggered by irrelevant search queries and saves your ad spend that could have been wasted by the irrelevant clicks.
They significantly reduce the unnecessary ad impressions and are more inclined towards making your ads relevant and focussed. By filtering the unwanted clicks, negative keywords improves your Click Through Rate.
As more qualified visitors are attracted with the help of negative keywords, there are more chances of them being converted leading to an increase in conversions. With improved Click Through Rate and increased conversions, your overall Quality Score goes up and there is a reduction in the Cost per Click.
For example, if you are ecommerce owner selling new washing machines. Neither you sell second-hand washing machines nor you repair washing machines.
To prevent your ads from displayed for irrelevant search queries like second-hand washing machine and repair washing machine, you can add “Second-hand” and “Repair” to your negative keyword list.
3. Optimize Your Ads
PPC ads are your first impression in front of your customers, so make sure it is the best one. There is no point of having relevant and optimized landing pages when your ads are not even capable of generating clicks.
There comes the need to optimize your ads.
Every text has a headline by which you can attract a lot of customers. Next is the display URL, which shows the address where your customer is going to land after clicking on your ad. The PPC ads are concluded with description lines that you can use to highlight the Unique Selling Proposition of your product/service.
While creating the ads make sure that they are specific and relevant. Be concise and to the point.
Avoid all the unnecessary words and include those words that add value to your product/service.
Target the emotions of the users because emotional connection drives more interest leading to more conversions.
Your PPC ads are incomplete without a Call-to-Action, so make sure to include one.
There are certain mistakes that you should avoid with PPC ads. The first one is that you should neither use All Caps nor capitalized letters within a word.
You should avoid using excessive exclamation points and repeated symbols. Another thing to check is spacing. Make sure that there are no extra spaces between letters or words.
If you want to include your phone number in the ads, then instead of including it in your headline or descriptions, you should use Call Extension.
The last but most important thing is that rather than beating around the bush or boasting about your product, clearly and accurately describe what you are selling and the benefits of using your product.
4. Correlate your Ads and Landing Pages
Okay, so now you have created a compelling ad copy that has a great headline, includes the Unique Selling Proposition of your headline and has a compelling Call-to-Action.
The visitors are attracted by your ads and click on it.
When they arrive at your landing page, they get disappointed and bounce back.
The reason being that your ads and landing page did not correlate.
The offer that you made in your ad was nowhere available on your landing page.
Therefore, to reduce bounce rate you have to make sure that your ads are backed by the landing page and they correlate with each other.
Since you have set expectations with your ad copy, you don’t want to lose your potential customers by disappointing them.
If your ad copy says “Free Trial for a Limited Period”, the landing page should align with that.
You would not want to say “Free Trial for a Limited Period” and link to a page that says “Pricing”. Your visitors will bounce because what they clicked on was not delivered.
Same is the case with the Call-to-Action, ensure that the CTA in the ad and the landing page matches.
5. Employ Remarketing Strategies
You spend a lot of time, effort and budget on your PPC Campaigns to make them profitable.
Why would you go through all this effort, to just have one chance to convert your visitors into customers?
To put it simply, if you are not using remarketing, you are simply throwing your money away.
There are many visitors that don’t convert right away but that doesn’t mean that they are not going to convert at all.
Remarketing is a technique which lets you retarget the people who have already visited your site.
With Remarketing, you can display your ads to the past visitors of your website who did not convert. This way you can capture the potential customers when they are ready to make the purchase.
The advantage of using the Remarketing Campaigns is that you have total control over which visitors do you want to target.
Do you want to target all the visitors of your site or the ones that viewed your product page or the ones that abandoned your cart?
You can further tailor your ads to target each of the visitor segmentation.
Every visitor on your site is digitally tagged, which lets you remarket to them.
As compared to other campaigns, remarketing campaigns receive a better CTR and higher conversions.
6. Test Your Ads and Landing Pages
A/B Testing is a strategy in PPC Marketing in which two versions i.e. A and B are tested against each other.
The goal of A/B Testing is to identify the changes that led to an increase in the performance of the PPC Campaigns.
It is a great way to measure the effectiveness of your PPC ads and landing page.
By testing the ads and the landing page, you can see which of the version is more effective and then can implement it in your campaign.
A/B Testing of your landing page and ads allows you to make the informed decisions about the particular elements with respect to your ads and landing page.
While testing the ads, you can create different versions of your headline and then test each one. You can also test the different Call-to-Action.
In the case of the landing page, you can test the headline, CTA, Images, List of benefits, and USP.
You can also run A/B test for an image based landing page and a video based landing page.
But one thing to take into consideration is that while conducting A/B test for your ads and landing page, take only one element at a time.
If your take multiple elements while conducting an A/B test, then it will become for you to ascertain which element lead to an increase in performance. Your results will get skewed and you will have to perform the test all over again.
7. Optimize PPC Campaigns for Mobile
Depending on the type of traffic, breaking your campaigns on the basis of the device is a great technique to enhance the performance of the entire campaign.
Over the time, there has been an increase in the number of mobile users. And for this, it becomes very important to create separate campaigns for mobile.
If you do not have clear mobile ad campaigns to promote your product on mobile devices, you’ll probably fall behind your competitors.
A large proportion of the population uses mobile phones or tablets. This means you have campaigns optimized specially for mobile users.
With mobile optimized campaigns, you can get a better chance to engage your mobile customers in the right format on their preferred device.
In addition, you can get more qualified traffic by separating the campaigns on the basis of the device.
You can also create mobile friendly landing pages for your existing campaigns because if you fail to make your landing pages viewable on mobile, you could lose on a lot of potential customers.
Not just having mobile optimized landing page is enough, you have to also observe the user behavior on the mobile devices.
While designing the landing page for mobile, if you place lengthy forms, you could possibly miss the opportunities to convert a lot of visitors into customers.
To avoid this, you should ask for a minimum of information to qualify the visitor into a lead.
You should also take into account the loading time of your mobile landing page to capture the attention of the user instantly.
Even one second of delay could have a negative impact on your mobile conversions.
Also, minimize distractions in the landing page and put your entire focus on the headline, benefits of your products and the CTA.
Conclusion
A properly maintained PPC campaign can help you to increase your conversions.
For a majority of businesses whether advertising online or offline, conversions are the sole objective to achieve.
Further, no matter how high your conversion rate is, there is always room for improvement.
This calls for Conversion optimization strategies, that gives insights on how you can possibly increase the conversions and revenue.
It should be noted that conversion optimization is that technique that should be implemented at regular intervals.
Go ahead and implement these conversion optimization strategies to increase your conversions and thereby profits.
About Author: Dinesh Thakur is the Co-Founder of Ads Triangle which is a Google Partner and Bing Accredited agency. He has over 7 years of experience in Pay Per Click Marketing.
Dinesh has helped hundreds of businesses to grow their revenue through PPC. He has expertise skills in Google AdWords and is passionate about Pay Per Click Marketing.
