“Advertising conversion” refers to a goal action that a visitor takes in an ad campaign. It is a broad term that can include anything from signing up for a newsletter to making a purchase. A prospect can complete many different types of advertising conversions. What you want to achieve with your ads depends largely on the type of campaign you’re running and the type of post-click experience needed to convert your visitor.
Use this list of the most common types of advertising conversion to decide when they’re likely to be used.
Click-through
A user clicks on an ad and is directed to a landing page. Once there, they will assess the information on the page to see if it is relevant to what they were expecting. People respond positively to the content and click the CTA button. That, in turn, takes them to another landing page. This page is designed to get people to take an action that is of higher value, such as signing up for a trial or making a purchase. Here’s an example of a click-through page from Moz:
Key to earning a click-through conversion
The purpose of a click-through conversion is to get visitors to agree to a higher value, higher friction conversion that comes after. Therefore, the key to getting it to work is to avoid being too pushy.
- Frontload your persuasive content: Don’t worry about payment details, sales terms, or credit card fields. Those can go on the page that follows your click-through landing page. On your click-through landing page, you want to focus only on persuasive content: all the benefits of claiming your offer and the proof that it works: success stories, positive case studies, glowing testimonials, statistics, etc. This kind of content emphasizes value while de-emphasizing the matter of cost. A good click-through page will convince visitors they need the product or service, regardless of the price.
- Make page length a function of risk: A good rule for post-click pages is: the higher the risk, the longer the page. If you’re selling a course for $50, your page won’t need to be as persuasive as if it were selling for $500. The more risk involved for the prospect, the more persuasive content you’ll need to earn the click-through, and the longer that page will be as a result.
- Test extensively: While A/B and multivariate testing can improve the conversion rate of pages at the top of your funnel, it’s the ones at the bottom that benefit most from the technique since they’re directly tied to revenue. A/B testing is great for determining the best overall page between drastically different designs and structures, while multivariate testing can help you determine which combination of elements on that page produces the best results. When every conversion counts, these two data collection techniques are an invaluable part of any campaign that aims for a click-through.
Leads
A lead is a potential customer who expresses interest in a product or service by submitting their contact information in exchange for an offer. That contact information could be email, phone number, social media profile, etc. And the offer could be a number of things: a resource, like an ebook or a report; it could be a service like an audit; newsletter, discount, or a demo:
A business’s lead generation process begins when a potential customer becomes aware of the business and its product or service. The prospect is interested in your service and has consented to being contacted by your marketing team if they exchange their contact information for your offer.
By collecting the following information, a business can start to qualify a lead through multiple channels, such as social media or email. The more information that is gathered, the more likely the lead is ready to buy.
Key to generating a lead conversion
Top-of-funnel goals are lower in friction than bottom-funnel goals. The key to turning a nameless prospect into a lead is to make it easy.
- Be brief: Keep copy to a minimum, and use a bulleted list to highlight the benefits of claiming your offer.
- Give a lot of value: Offer ebooks, tip sheets, reports, email newsletters with discounts and updates.
- Ask for little in return: At the top of the funnel, when your only concern is generating a lead to begin qualification, ask for little more than email.
- Don’t overwhelm with media: When you’re offering a lot of value for little in return, there’s minimal risk for the prospect. You don’t need countless trust badges, explainer videos, and infographics to convince them to exchange their email for an ebook. On top-of-funnel post-click pages, go minimal.
Purchase/Sale
This refers to any time money is exchanged for goods or services. The most desired conversion is when a lead has been nurtured and they feel comfortable making a purchase.
Key to generating a sale conversion
If you have a great landing page, your sales page only needs to complete the task. The work is mostly done. Although visitors may be hesitant to input sensitive information or commit to a purchase, it is important that they feel comfortable doing so. The key is emphasizing security.
- Show confidence in your product: Nothing says confidence in your product like a satisfaction guarantee. These tend to make visitors more comfortable buying since they feel there’s recourse if they don’t like the product.
- Take advantage of badges: HTTPS provides security, but it’s the feeling of security that gets your visitors converting. “Secure” in the address bar can do it, but icons from Norton Antivirus, the Better Business Bureau, or even a generic lock, can sometimes be what visitors need to be sure their information is safe. Here’s an example from Salesforce:
- Keep your form as frictionless as possible: On your sales page, a visitor will look for any reason to second guess your brand and their purchase. That’s why it’s more important than ever to make the purchase process as frictionless as possible. Only capture what’s absolutely necessary to make the sale, and make sure all forms are clearly labeled–that the labels are permanent and outside the fields, not inside them as gray disappearing placeholder text. Error messages should be clear and concise, and a user should have no problem correcting their mistakes.
Before You Start Creating Ads
You shouldn’t buy ads without a plan. Before placing ads on social networks, here are the things you need to do:
1. Define Your Goals
You need to start by defining your advertising goals. You need to set goals in order to measure your success. Some social advertising goals include the following.
- Increasing your fans and followers on Facebook and Twitter.
- Getting leads for a specific product or service.
- Recruiting new talent for an open position at your company.
- Increasing signups for an upcoming webinar.
- Growing your mailing list by offering an eBook, whitepaper, coupon, or other downloadable freebie.
2. Create Optimized Landing Pages
If you want to have successful conversions on your ads, don’t advertise one thing and then lead your visitors to something else when they click on your ad. If you want to promote a specific service, you should link to a landing page about that service. Your homepage is not the best place to do this because visitors would have to search for a link to more details about what you were advertising.
Your next step, after deciding what to advertise, is to create a landing page for that specific item or to optimize your existing landing page for conversions. You will not get many conversions if you do not spend your advertising budget wisely.
If you use ecommerce-based click-through landing pages, you will use your landing page to increase thevisitor’s interest before directing them to your website.
3. Prepare Your Website
Your next step, if using click-through landing pages, is to set up and track your advertising goals on your website. I personally prefer Google Analytics because it makes it easy to set up goals that track when visitors complete specific actions. A goal is something that is completed by a visitor on your website, such as making a purchase, submitting a form, or clicking a button.
You will also need to track your conversions . To make it easy to track goal conversions from your advertising, create specific UTM parameters for the URLs you use in your ads.
4. Check Out the Competition
First off, let’s look at your competition. You can find inspiration for your ad by browsing through the Facebook Adboard, which shows the latest ads targeted to your profile.
When looking at ads, consider which ones stand out based on their images and which are appealing to you based on the title text or description. Do you think you’re more likely to look at an ad because a friend likes the business?
5. Create the Title, Description, and Image
An advertisement should remind potential customers of a problem they may face and what your product, service, eBook, whitepaper, or webinar can offer to solve it.
Your ad should include an attention-grabbing image, like the product you’re advertising, a well-known person from the business, or a symbol of the problem you’re solving. The best size for Facebook ad images is 100px X 72px.
If you are able to display social activity from a related page based on the URL you have entered for your ad, it is beneficial to do so. If you notice that a friend has liked your business on Facebook, this may help you convince someone else to like your business as well.
6. Choose Your Audience Targeting Options
Be sure to use targeting options to your advantage. Your ads should not be geared towards a large audience that will click on them frequently but not convert very often. Less clicks and impressions may result in more conversions and ROI for social advertising.
On Facebook, you can target your ad based on:
- Demographics – Choose your audience based on location, age, and gender.
- Precise Interests – Choose your audience based on what they’ve listed as an interest on their personal timeline. Information is pulled from interests, activities, education, job titles, pages they’ve liked, or groups they belong to. Topics with a # let you target everyone interested in something closely related to the topic.
- Broad Categories – Use broad category targeting to reach groups of people who share similar interests and traits. Information is pulled from what people include in their personal timelines.
- Connections – Target your ad towards anyone or towards those who are connected to your Facebook page, app, or event.
- Friends of Connections – Target your ad towards anyone or towards those who are friends with people who are connected to your Facebook page, app, or event.
7. Choose Your Audience Targeting Options
When advertising to businesses, LinkedIn offers the best targeting options. You can choose from.
- Demographics – Choose your audience based on location, gender, and age.
- Company – Select companies by name or by category including industry and company size.
- Job Title – Show your ads to people with specific job titles, job functions, and seniority.
- School – Target LinkedIn users who attend or graduated from a specific school.
- Skills – Target LinkedIn users with specific skills.
- Group – Enter specific group names. Helpful if you are well known in participating in particular LinkedIn Groups .
If you choose to show your ads on other websites through the LinkedIn Audience Network, your ads will be displayed on a collection of partner websites. It’s a great way to increase the number of people your ad reaches.
8. Choose Cost Per Click
If an ad campaign has a Cost Per Click of $2.00, that means you are only paying $2.00 each time someone clicks on your ad. You will want to make sure you have carefully targeted your ad to the audience most likely to convert since LinkedIn’s suggested bids are generally higher than those of Facebook or Twitter.
Marketers are more focused on generating leads than they are on keeping customers, even though it is more profitable to keep current customers than generate new ones. They are looking for leads and sales on Facebook, YouTube, Google, and LinkedIn. The following data suggests that they need to be more focused on the post-click experience. Otherwise, they’ll continue to leave money on the table.
Related posts:
