Now more than ever is it vital that businesses increase their conversion rate. After all, you don’t want people to just come to your website and leave — you want them to convert! And that means finding the right ways to optimise your conversion rate.
While your reach statistics may be reassuringly robust, they can give an extremely misleading impression of your online engagement. Your reach tells you that a lot of people are landing on your website. But how many of those are converting into actual paying customers? Or at the very least, qualified leads? If that figure is significantly less than your reach, you could have a problem. Especially when you’re using Pay Per Click (PPC) ads.
PPC is an investment, and like any investment, you want to ensure that you see a significant return to justify your ad spend. Don’t make the mistake of assuming that your ROI is out of your control. By taking steps to improve conversion rates you can get more bang for your PPC buck.
Let’s take a look at 5 Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) tips that will make your ads more effective and improve ad spending ROI.
Almost three quarters of online consumers admit to being frustrated with brands when ad copy has nothing to do with their interests. Personalisation is now a must.
Personalisation can help to ensure that consumers engage with your PPC ads. The good news is that the tools are already at your disposal to create custom and targeted audiences on different channels and tailor your ad copy accordingly. Facebook, Twitter and Google all have the capability to offer incredible granularity in who your ads are targeting, where and when.
You can even A/B test different ads to see which ads resonate best with your audiences. And if you ever find yourself unsure of who to target, try using your own customers’ demographic makeups to target lookalike audiences.
When you offer the right people what they need in the right and time, improved Click Through Rates are an inevitable consequence.
While there’s a great deal of scope to make changes to the wording and imagery of PPC ad copy and tailor it to the needs and interests of your audience, the product always needs to match the ad.
If there is a clear discrepancy between the product in the ad and the product that is offered in the landing page, you can expect users to bounce away from your landing or product page quickly. This doesn’t just mean making sure that the right products link to the right landing pages. It also means ensuring that there is synergy in the offering between the ad and the landing page. Oversell in the ad or over-promise on your products and prospects will get cold feet when they take a closer look at the landing page.
Your ad should expand on the offering made by the ad while capitalising on the reader’s interest and building momentum. It needs to provide them with the information they need to make an informed decision.
Perhaps brands expect too much of consumers by thinking that they’ll convert on first exposure to their ads. The statistics demonstrate that only 2% of website visitors make a purchase on their first visit. And that’s people who’ve actually visited your website, much less seen your ad pop up on a Google search or their social feeds.
Retargeting can help brands make a lingering impression on prospects, following them around as they navigate to different sites. While some brands may consider retargeting to be invasive, there’s no disputing that it works, with retargeted ads earning 10 times the Click Through Rate of standard PPC ads and increase conversions by 150%.
Retargeting helps to build familiarity with the product and keep the brand at the forefront of the prospect’s mind.
Conversion requires a leap of faith on the prospect’s behalf. And in a crowded commercial landscape, that can be a pretty big ask. Promotional offerings, however, can help to entice consumers with exclusive, limited time offers that are just for them. Promotions are no longer a novelty in the online landscape.
In fact, 75% of consumers expect them. Consumers have become so accustomed to brands trying to engage them through promotional offerings that yours will need to be special if you hope to improve your conversion rates. Fortunately, when you have the tools at your disposal to create unique single-use promo codes — using a promo code engine like Uniqodo — you can leverage them to create unmissable promotions paired with engaging ad copy.
Here are some tips to make your promotional offerings more effective and engaging, thereby increasing your chances of conversion:
Get specific when talking about the promotional offerings in your ad copy “20% off all footwear” is a far more engaging offering than “Huge discounts on shoes”.
If you get prospects excited about your discounts, the last thing you want is for that excitement to fizzle out when they realise that they have to jump through a series of hoops on your landing page to claim them. Try using Auto-Fill links and Auto-Copy buttons where possible to remove barriers to conversion.
Be sure to couch your promotional offerings in terms that will add value to the prospect. For instance, 50% extra free is basically the same thing as 33% off… but which of the two sounds more appealing to the bargain-hungry prospect.
Prospects are less likely to convert if they believe that they have all the time in the world to claim promotional offerings. Leverage scarcity marketing tactics to ensure that they either click on your ads now or risk missing out on a great deal. Limited-time promotions and diminishing discounts are great ways to get consumers off the fence.
When you have an iterative approach to PPC ads, you can better tailor your ad copy to different markets and channels to increase your chances of higher conversion rates. A/B testing is one way of doing this and can illustrate the ways in which even subtle changes in wording, images and CTAs can impact conversion rates.
However, Dynamic Creative Optimisation (DCO) can leverage powerful machine learning to take the guesswork out of A/B testing and tell you which ads are likely to get the best conversion rates before your campaign even starts.
DCO identifies ways in which even small nuances in colour, object positioning, relative sizes of objects and CTA positioning can impact on conversion rates and even allow you to continually change ads based on prospects’ browsing history and preferences, taking personalisation to a whole new level.
Partner this with unique single-use promotional codes and you can deliver much more appealing ad copy and send conversion rates climbing consistently.
Whichever of the above methods you use, it’s imperative that you address the issues that drive conversion and add value for the prospect. This will ensure that PPC endeavours land effectively and that ad spend isn’t wasted on low-converting campaigns.