In Q3 of 2016, competition is fierce and advertisers are having to roll out all the stops in order to surge ahead on the playing field.
For most paid search advertisers increasing conversion rates and lowering cost per conversion are the top priorities. Many advertisers are focused on how to get more clicks but overlook how to increase conversion rates on clicks they currently pay for. Here are a few basics that will improve your paid search conversion rate in 2016.
1. Utilize Multiple Types of Ad Format
Typically people don’t think of changing ads to improve conversion rates. However, today’s ads are built to sell, either by putting people directly on the product page or by bringing the conversion to the ad itself. Google AdWords offers a variety of ad formats that advertisers can choose from depending on their paid search needs. Each ad format has its own unique advertising capability. Text ads are one of the most basic and essential ad formats that AdWords and Bing Ads offers. Amongst text ads, there are also video ads, shopping ads, image ads, call-only ads and more. Leveraging multiple types of ad formats can boost your businesses online visibility.
Shopping ads are recommended for almost all e-commerce websites. Shopping ads show images of your individual products with the item’s price at the top of Google’s search results. The platform is much like Amazon shopping experience where the search results show the item the user is searching for displayed from multiple vendors. Google Shopping ads can take precedence over text ads because of the instant gratification it offers. Running both shopping and text ads simultaneously boosts your businesses online visibility and improves conversion rates.
Remarketing ads help re-engage with recent visitors from your site. Remarketing ads are customizable and allow the advertiser to specify which type of website visitor to remarket to. Adwords allows you to remarket to a certain demographic or a user that failed to complete the desired action (e.g. a shopping cart abandoner). If a user’s browsing experience was interrupted, remarketing can help remind the user of your site.
Call-Only ads are for advertisers that prefer the customer to call the business directly as opposed to visiting their website. Speaking directly with your customers can help resolve any uncertainties about the product or service as well as build trust between the merchant and customer.
2. Landing Page Optimization
After a customer get’s to your site from Google’s search results, they instantly need to find the product or service they were initially searching for in addition to having a sense of trust with your business’s website. Simplifying the customers shopping experience will increase conversion rates. Eliminate the scrambling search process for the customer by bringing them to the landing page of the specific item they were searching for.
Be Descriptive on your landing page by providing instruction and reason for the customer to buy your product over the next competitor.
Offer Incentives Offering Coupon Codes with expirations dates is a great way to keep people from venturing elsewhere looking for deals. For coupon codes, make applying them as easy as possible.
Build trust with your customer by displaying customer reviews, ratings, and testimonials. Make it easy for the customer to contact you to resolve any uncertainty with your business or product.
Streamline the Checkout Process Companies like Shopify and Amazon are definitely gurus of conversion. Their entire checkout process is built to do several things including upsells.
Be Mobile-Friendly More than 50% of searches begin on mobile devices. Even B2B customers are human and will do searches from mobile. Having a mobile friendly website or landing page makes it easy for customers to browse and buy from the convenience of their mobile device. If you don’t have a mobile-friendly website or landing page try a Call-Only campaign for mobile devices.
3. Kill the JUNK Traffic
Monitoring search queries is the obvious and most common practice advertisers perform to weed out irrelevant visits. Newer targeting methods include using broad match modified keywords which offer good targeting capability and reasonable volume. Here are some other ideas involving negative keywords.
Inefficiencies in Shopping Campaigns Since Shopping Campaigns target users based on information in the product feed (such as Title and Description), there is no use of keywords. Because of this, search queries (and negative keywords) are often overlooked. Google often will show products triggered from too general of search queries. The use of negative exact match keywords to eliminate general searches queries can help a lot.
Watch Out for Google’s ‘Add as Negative Keyword’ Button By default, Google adds in Negative Exact match keywords when you click the “Add as Negative” button on the Search Query Tab. This limits the effectiveness of the negative because its only prohibits that exact search.
While the core of advertising practices don’t change day to day, or year to year for that matter, it’s important to have a strong foundation by getting good at them and by keeping them up to date. Paying for traffic is the expensive part, but not the easy part. Conversion GIANT spends a lot of time getting the right traffic to our advertisers websites, but we spend the most time figuring out how to convert it better.
