Conversion rates are the key to any online marketing campaign.
Improving your website’s conversion rate is essential for success, whether you are a seasoned digital marketer or new to the field. Knowing how to track conversion rates and how to increase them is key.
You need to draw in audiences in order to hit target sales. But what’s the average conversion rate across the board? Which goals should you target with your advertisement or content strategy?
This all comes down to your area of expertise, the methods of marketing you employ, and how you interact with your clients. Typically, 2-5 percent is considered an average conversion rate.
The average conversion rate is 2.35 percent.
The data reveals that the top 25 percent of websites in an industry have a conversion rate of 5.31 percent or higher. To be in the top 10 percent of your niche, you should aim for a conversion rate of 11.45 percent.
Why Do Conversion Rates Matter?
The success of your marketing campaigns can be easily tracked by conversion rates to ensure that your budget is not being wasted.
The aim of a marketing campaign is to persuade people to take a desired action, such as signing up for a service, purchasing a product, filling out a lead generation form, providing their email address, or taking some other specific action.
You market so that people will do what you want in order to eventually make a profit for your company.
How will you know if your strategy is working?
Conversion rates!
A good campaign will persuade many people to take action and achieve the desired result. An ineffective campaign won’t.
If your conversion rate is significantly below average, you should evaluate your marketing strategy. If your conversion rate is average to high, you have a better idea of what is working.
If you don’t want to put in the work to track your conversions, you’ll end up wasting time and money on the wrong campaigns.
If you never analyze what makes your users convert and where they leave your site, you won’t be able to improve your marketing campaigns.
Your conversion rate matters.
9 Ways To Increase Conversion Rate Optimization for PPC Advertising
1. Add More Social Proof to Your Site
Your audience won’t always blindly believe what you say. To be convincing, you must have evidence to support your claims.
If you want to improve your customer trust and conversions, research indicates that you should add social proof to your site. Most consumers check reviews before purchasing an item, and most people are more likely to trust a review over an advertisement.
By adding testimonials that are prominently displayed, WikiJob was able to increase their conversions by 34 percent.
Here’s how you can add social proof:
- Add customer reviews: Every e-commerce site has a customer reviews section because 93 percent of customers read online reviews before buying a product.
- Include case studies: Case studies in the form of stories or blog posts can help position you as a genuine business making a real difference in the world.
- Use social proof pop-ups: Add pop-up notifications to your sales page to show user activity. For instance, here’s an image from Proof Factor (a social proof popup app) to show what these popups can look like.
2. Shorten Your Forms to Increase Conversions
An e-commerce store that you find interesting may have great products that are affordable to you. The only problem? In order to sign up or get more information, you will need to fill out long forms.
Long forms can help you learn important details about your customers, including their contact information, likes and dislikes, and what they’re looking for in a product or service. Although it may be time-consuming for users to fill out numerous fields, it is important to consider that they only want to do this so that they can access the information or purchase the product quickly.
If you want to reduce frustration and lower bounce rates, consider shortening your forms to only collect the most essential information. If you want people to sign up for your newsletter or take advantage of a special offer, make sure your form is short and concise.
A test completed by Marketo found that their conversion rate with a 9-field form was 10 percent. The conversion rate went up to 13.4 percent when there were only 5 fields.
Here’s how you can shorten your forms:
- Only collect essential fields first: Focus on the essentials when starting your relationship and ask for any other information via email, surveys, or follow-up calls.
- Collect information via a third-party account: If you can, add the option to sign up through an account like Google so they don’t have to enter their information each time. This way, you make it easier for users to find what they need, making them more likely to buy from you.
3. Keep It Super Simple (KISS)
One way to make the buying process easier for customers is to use shorter forms.
Making your user experience simpler can help increase your conversion rate.
The average attention span today is shorter than it was 10 years ago. Etsy ran an experiment on user experience where they added 160kb hidden images to intentionally slow down some of their mobile pages. They saw a 12 percent increase in bounce rates.
Keeping the process simple is important for more than just UX design and load speeds. If a form is too complicated, 67% of users will abandon it.
Here are some ways to keep things super simple:
- Offer clear instructions: Where should they click? What information should they enter? How do they find the right color/size?
- Make your CTA obvious: Have properly positioned buttons. The shopping cart should be easy to find and edit. The next step in the buying process should be obvious even to the most new-to-tech user.
- Don’t offer too many options: It’s tempting to offer a lot of choices, but sometimes this can work against you. Don’t confuse the users. Keep it simple. Add filters to help them navigate through the choices.
4. Meet Customer Expectations
Having a good product to sell isn’t always enough. Conversion rates can be increased by meeting customer expectations.
In a survey of 15,000 customers by PwC, it was found that 1 in 3 would leave a brand they love forever after only one bad experience. If a company has negative interactions with a customer, 92% of the time the customer will forget about the company.
Some reports even show that as many as two-thirds of customers can’t remember the last time a brand exceed their expectations.
Here are some tips to continually meet (and exceed) customer expectations:
- Run experiments: Experiment with user testing tools to see what customers like and dislike before making big changes.
- Ask for feedback: Offer an incentive to some of your customers to give you feedback on their experience.
- User testing platforms: Invest in user testing platforms like TrymyUI, Userlytics, Maze, etc. You can use heatmaps to find what appeals to first-time or repeat visitors and which areas are glossed over.
Edit your website to match user expectations once you have gathered the necessary information.
Try to make the user experience as satisfying as possible so that you can increase your chances of converting the visitor into a customer.
5. Make Appropriate Segments
PPC Managers find Google AdWords’ segment views to be extremely useful. If you are running conversions and tracking them, you can compare the results across the different available segments.
- Time: By viewing the many dimensions of time (i.e day of week, hour of day), you can get a decent idea of what time you are getting more conversions as well as the cost/conversion across each segment. Go to your Setting Tab to set the right schedule that makes the most sense for your campaign and the conversions you want to garner.
- Network (with search partners): Remember that Google has many of search partners they leverage to serve up Paid Search ads. But sometimes these other networks do not produce enough conversions to warrant advertising. By viewing this data and then going back into your settings tab to focus solely on the Google Network, you can increase conversions. The vice versa logic can also hold true from a cost/conversion standpoint.
- Click Type: Under this segment, you can view where you are getting conversions, be it via clicks from the headlines or clicks from the sitelinks. If your sitelinks happen to be driving decent conversions but it’s click-through rate is low, you may determine that improving the copy of those sitelinks can improve overall conversions. For smaller campaigns under $2,000 per month, this may not be huge, but if you’re spending over $10,000 per month or $200 per day or more, this could result in significant savings.
- Device: I could have mentioned this under Click Type, but here it’s more dynamic. Can mobile improve the overall conversions of our campaigns? This segment can share great insights into this question. Remember that mobile is not best suited for everyone. For the typical B2B marketer compared to B2C marketer, you may determine that mobile is seldom driving conversions. If this is the case, you can reduce the max bid by 95 – 100% so you’re not showing mobile ads and thus saving your budget for the computer and tablet campaigns. Unfortunately, we cannot segment out tablet versus computer, but hopefully Google will grant advertisers more flexibility in this regard in the future.
- Conversion Rate Optimizer: For those who love to automate, Google AdWords’ Conversion Rate Optimizer will do the trick. You have to gather enough data (minimum 30 conversions) and in particular conversions for this to work, but overtime Google will dynamically bid on your behalf based on where you are likely to get the best cost per conversion.
6. Align Ad Copy With Landing Pages
Your PPC ad copy should match the keywords you are targeting and should be directed to the right landing page on your website. If someone searches for a sectional sofa and you only send them to your overall sofa category, you could lose out on that sale because the person may be too lazy to search for sectional sofas on your site or they may not be able to find them.
Do not leave it to chance. Do not assume that your shoppers are ready to buy. If you want to increase conversions, make sure that interested shoppers land on the right page. This will depend on how well your pages convert in general, as well as how much competition there is in the market. This strategy will also increase your quality score, which will reduce cost per click, increase the usage of your budget, and then translate into more opportunities for more conversions. Its all a well oiled machine.
7. Implement Click Through Rate Best Practices
In my post, I explore 50 different strategies you can use to increase your click-through rate for paid search ads. strategies include using ad extensions, creating compelling ad copy, and targeting your audience. As a quick recap, we covered:
- The process of identifying click-through rate opportunities for any paid search campaign
- The practical benefits of increased click-through rates
- Strategies that PPC managers or companies can implement to increase the click-through rate of Paid Search campaigns.
Increasing the click-through rates on your ads can lead to more conversions. The more targeted your ads are, the more likely you are to have conversions on your website. It’s an extensive list but worth viewing.
8. Leverage Special Offers
The promotional advertising world is worried about shoppers only buying during sales. The likes of Express, Jos. A. If there are sales at the bank, other retailers, or e-commerce platforms, I will shop at those stores. I get why people who work in programming would only want to buy something when it’s on sale. We generally don’t want this to occur, unless it’s part of the company’s business model.
If you want to increase your leads and sales, you should create special offers for people who sign up or make a purchase. The offer might be for a free trial or a store credit. You can use promotional marketing techniques to make your Google ads more effective and take advantage of opportunities. Only offer a special promotion if you are sincerely providing a discount.
9. Negative Keywords
For pay-per-click adverting, this is another standard bearer. One of the best ways to increase conversions is by utilizing this strategy. If you’re spending your paid search campaign budget on keywords that aren’t converting and noticing that some keywords are triggering ads they shouldn’t, adding those keywords to your negative list will make your budget last longer, lower your overall cost per conversion, and increase conversions. You can improve your search engine optimization by removing unnecessary keywords from your search terms report. unneeded keywords can negatively impact your site’s Ranking and SERP results. Negative keywords can be added as a phrase to prevent your ads from being shown when people search for that phrase.
Conclusion
As a PPC marketer, your focus may be more on brand awareness than on purchases or other sub-macro conversions. Although brand awareness is important, you should also focus on the metrics that are most relevant to your campaign, and track conversions for the keywords you are targeting.
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