Improve Conversion

Paid search can be the quickest tool to deliver results on your site.

Unfortunately, it can also leave many with a bad taste in their mouth and the thought that “Paid Search is not for them” or this is just a “money making scheme by Google”. PPC works and is why Google is now bigger than brands like Coca Cola despite not even existing 10 years ago. One of the main reasons people end up feeling like this is due to poor set up which makes management and the ability to improve conversion very difficult.

We have put together 12 tips. Part 1 explains Points 1-6.

All these points should help to improve overall conversion. If not applied together then you will not maximise the performance of your online marketing approach or reach your desired amount of completed goals.

1) Firstly Do Your Research

Use a keyword tool and competitor analysis to get a good impression of the online volume and bid prices you should expect on the keywords you plan to advertise under. This will help with both the structure and budget when setting up your PPC account.

2) Create an Effective Structure

After conducting research it is vital to setup a clear and flexible structure in the areas you wish to advertise. This will help you focus on specific products or services and easily manage your budget to focus on key performing areas. For example as budgets can only be set at campaign level, to prioritise on better performing products you would need to separate these products into individual campaigns. E.g. If you were to sell two products and one converts at higher rate online then would be wise to focus more of your budget on the better performing product. This cannot be done if both products are under one campaign. If you decide to do this at a later stage then you will lose all of your history and quality score (these terms are explained below). This is why it is crucial to get the structure right from the start.

3) Target Your Audience

It is important to target visitors you can realistically provide a product or service to. This helps to avoid wasting budget on visitors that you cannot provide for and reduce costs. This will increase the possibility of a conversion on your website due to the relevance of the visitors. As well as choosing the location of your ads you can also target searchers over certain time periods. For example, it would be wise for businesses that can only answer the phone in office hours to concentrate running their ads and spending the budget during this period of the day on weekdays. However, if spare budget is available then running ads all week is advised.

It is crucial to be as specific as possible. An example below shows how effective and specific terms should be if you are renting e.g. Self catering chalets in Chamonix.

• Catered chalets for Chamonix = Bullseye
• Chalets in Chamonix = close
• Chamonix accommodation = outer ring
• Skiing = even further out
• Holiday = even further out

4) The Importance of Advert Relevance

Ensure the advert is both relevant to both the search terms you are advertising under and also the page you are sending them to. It is important to make sure your ad is appealing to the searcher so it stands out from your rivals. The relevance of each ad will help to improve the overall CTR (click through rate) which is the percentage of total searchers that click through to the website from your ads. A Call to action, such as promotional offers, is likely to attract more visitors leading to a better chance of a conversion. Calls to action such as ‘click here’ or ‘buy online now’ should convince the searcher to perform the desired action on you website.

5) Make Sure You Split Test

Make sure you always have more than one advert running to determine which adverts convert more searchers to visitors. By doing so you should be able to adapt the best possible ad text to continually attract a higher percentage of searchers each month.

6) Landing On The Right Page!

This is the key point of the customer journey on your website. It is crucial that the visitor finds exactly what they are looking for and also the advert and keyword relate to the page. The relevancy of the advert plays a major part in determining the price that you pay for each click/visitor. This also affects the customer performance to the intended goal on the website. E.g.  Someone looking specifically for an Audi A8 will want to be sent directly through to the Audi A8 page or range. Sending them to the homepage instead may be frustrating and the visitor may leave rather than browse to find the page themselves.

View tips 7-12

These are the remainder of the tips to increase conversion from your PPC campaign.

7)  The Three Match Types

There are three important match types, broad, phrase and exact. Matches are keyword options we have to control how precise a user’s search term must be to trigger our adverts. To keep campaigns targeted use phrase and exact initially. If you have additional budget then add broad matches. With very specific terms such as a models number, broad matching is effective and also a good way off attracting a larger volume of visitors. For Example: The brand name ‘Falcon’ is best used only in phrase and exact matches.

• Exact means your advert will only show if someone types in the exact word ‘falcon ovens’ with no other words attached.
• Phrase would mean that your ad would show if the keywords were shown in any sentence or phrase so long as it is in the exact sequence and form that you specify. E.g. phrase would show your advert in the following sentence, “buy falcon ovens” but not “review ovens made by falcon”.
• Broad however would show your ad under very generic and often irrelevant phrases. E.g. “Falcon planes”.

8) Don’t Forget Your Negatives

Using negatives is crucial to filter out irrelevant searches for your more generic terms. This avoids wasting budget which could be used targeting areas that have a higher propensity to convert. For example a company selling meat may advertise under the term ‘beef’. Adding the negatives of ‘recipes’ and ‘how to cook’ will prevent irrelevant searchers clicking through your ads and therefore costing you money!

9) Bid pricing & Ad Positioning

This will depend on where you want to appear on Google based on the budget at your disposal. These prices will need to be constantly monitored as they will fluctuate due to competitor bidding and ad relevance as discussed previously.

10) Use of Tracking Tools

Tracking tools work alongside your PPC to monitor which keywords lead to conversions and the customer’s pathway to, and through your website. This is a very effective way of identifying areas that lead to conversions allowing you to focus your budget. A great free tool is Google Analytics which gives a very good insight into individual keyword performance. There are a number of other paid tools that perform a variety of different functions depending on your business needs.

11) Be aware of Quality Score & History

Quality score is a Google System that rates the relevancy of your keywords based on landing page and ad text. Having a high quality score can reduce your cost per conversion. Having a good quality score over a period of time will result in a build up of history meaning Google will reward you by reducing bid prices.

12) And Most Importantly…..

Constant Monitoring & Management- These 11 points will not be as effective and result in fewer conversions if not under constant monitoring and management as online trends and competitors continually change their online marketing approach.

All these points should help to improve overall conversion. If not applied together then you will not maximise the performance of your online marketing approach or reach your desired amount of completed goals or sales.

Analytics is a must have on any website. If you do not have it set up yet, we would recommend you to sign up for your free account with Google at http://www.google.com/analytics/sign_up.html

One of the key features of Analytics is setting up what is known as goal tracking. With goal tracking in place, you can view which marketing campaigns are resulting in goals/conversion. With this information to hand, you can begin to focus on campaigns that generate the most leads/goals and implement changes to those that are not performing so well.

What could you set up as a goal?

• ‘Contact us’ form submissions
• PDF download requests
• Competition sign ups
• Site registration
• ‘Offer’ sign up

Setting up your analytics account is crucial. Without it you could be analysing and making changes based on irrelevant or incorrect data. This could result in your changes doing more harm that good.

Set up Analytics correctly

This article http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2008/05/8-stupid-things-webmasters-do-to-mess-up-their-analytics.html has summarised the 8 biggest mistakes people make when setting up analytics accounts and how to rectify them. We were hard pressed to add much to this so have added their link.

However this post does not include the advantages of setting up additional website segments. The website segments tool allows you to separate your data into various profiles such as organic search, paid search, returning customers, new customers, by area etc. You can then analyse these areas on their own or compare them together.

You may need to know how one of the profiles reacted to changes you made rather than diluting results with all visitor data. The profiles segments set up here should be based on your aims and objectives such as new visitors and returning visitors, brand aware and those that are unaware of the brand.

One of our favourite segments is search traffic with and without brand terms. If you include brand terms in any paid or nor paid search reports it is likely that the figures will be diluted as a brand aware visitor, and possibly a returning customer, are far more likely to convert. Therefore the data will indicate that you are attracting new customers at a higher conversion rate than you actually are.

Build personas and identify goals for each one.

By using segmentation it is easy to analyse the data for each persona and suggest changes accordingly. A very simple example below shows how different goals need to be analysed for different segments.

1. John is a potential new visitor who has not heard of your company and we want him to download our free PDF guide.
2. Sarah is a returning visitor and her goal is to buy a product. She is unlikely to download the free PDF guide as she may already have it.

Bryan Eisenburg has posted his 7 deadly sins of Analytics which we recommend should be read by all. http://www.grokdotcom.com/2008/10/27/7-deadly-sins-of-web-analytics/

Every site today should have a form of some sort to capture details and make it easy for potential customers to get in touch or register.

However, more often than not the form makes it harder rather than easier for a customer to make contact.

Common Mistakes on forms

• No title or heading above the form to tell the user what the form is for and what they should expect after filling out the form.
• Not making it clear which fields have to be filled in. Additionally once a user sends the form but have not filled in all required fields, is there a clear message to tell them what has been missed.
• Do you need to know the life story of the person sending the form? The more fields the less likely they are to complete. Of course demographic interests are good to know but they can be drawn from a customer later when they have a better relationship with you.
• Don’t use reset buttons. The only thing this is likely to do is be clicked by accident instead of the send button and frustrate the user.
• Instead of using ’submit’ use text that forces the user to click like, ‘Contact me now’, ‘receive your quote’, ’send me your brochure’ etc.
• Use a better image than the standard grey box so it stands out more and is more appealing to the eye.

The most important element

How are your users going to find your form? If it is only on the enquiry page, and only 20% of your visitors go to that page, then 80% of your visitors will not find the form to even try and submit.

Look at incorporating on all pages if possible or on each main product or service page.

Use tracking to improve conversion rates via tools like Google Analytics

• Do you know how many form submission you have over a given period?
• Do you monitor submission rates?
• Do you know where successful submissions came from?

Try to send successful submission to a new ”Thank You’ page. This can then be tracked as a goal and by using analytics you can see the submission rates from keywords, direct to site, other sites, banner campaigns etc. By using this data you can drive up spend and focus on the areas that are leading to submissions.

On the ‘thank you’ page reinforce when they can expect a reply. If you say you are going to get back to them in 24 hours make sure you do. Point them to other products or services they may be interested in or highlight more information about your business and why they should buy from you. They have taken action on your site and are likely to do so again if you have an attractive offering.