Are people clicking on your paid Google ads but not making the purchase? A high click-through rate paired with low conversion can be one of the worst nightmares for any company. It means your ad is doing something right, but also something wrong. It also means you are losing a lot of money. Follow these expert tips to skyrocket your google ads conversion rate.
1. Your keyword choice can change the game
Your ad shows up when people search for something. Guessing what your target audience will search for is the first step to increasing conversion. This is where keywords come in. There are three golden rules for selecting the right keywords for any PPC campaign. Pay heed.
- Be more specific with your keyword. Long-tailed keywords always perform better when it comes to conversions. They reach the kind of audience who are most likely to convert. If you are selling toys, using a specific keyword like “buy children’s toys under $50” is going to be more effective than just “children’s toys.
- Create a balance between generic and specific keywords. Using only long-tailed keywords will get fewer impressions since fewer people will be searching for such specific terms. Striking the right balance of keywords is vital.
- Utilize the power of negative keywords. With it, you can limit the reach of your ad when the chances of conversion are meager. Say someone is looking for free services or products. You can set the negative keyword as “free” so your ad doesn’t appear in those searches. People who are not looking to make a purchase won’t click on your ad. So they won’t cost you money unnecessarily.
2. Figure out your current PPC conversion rate
Before you go wild with your ad campaign, first assess where you stand. The free Google ads conversion tracking tool is your best bet. It does what it says—shows the percentage of traffic from paid ads that actually convert.
Here are the primary purposes of this tool:
- Making changes to your ad campaign in real-time. You can make a small change and see how that affects your conversion rate. If the rate increases, keep repeating the action.
- Determining the success rate of each marketing tactic. This information can be helpful in all your future PPC ad campaigns.
- Comparing the conversion rates of several ongoing ad campaigns and comparing the results of this month’s campaign with the previous month’s to track progress.
3. Run trial ads or replicate your past success
What worked in the past may work again. Identify previously successful Google Ad campaigns, dissect them to identify potent micro-processes, and repeat them. By “past,” I mean the last few months up to a year. It depends on how fast your industry changes.
If you don’t have such a perfect previous ad campaign, trial ads can produce similar results. One can understand how this can be done through an example. Let’s assume you want to sell a course on acquiring 2000 newsletter subscribers in a month. Here are your options:
- You can run several test ads for this campaign and tweak something each time. Begin with location, demographics, search term results, description.
- Now study the effect of each change on your conversion rate. Maybe changing the age range to 30-50 years yields more results than a different or broader range.
- Study the results. After various trial runs, you can figure out which factors do the trick. The rest is easy. Just put the best-performing factors together to create a Google ad campaign with a high conversion rate.
Note: The trial run method is going to be more expensive. If you already have a nearly perfect PPC ad model to replicate, you can significantly save costs.
4. Invest in remarketing strategies
Sometimes it takes a few tries for the arrow to hit the mark. In other words, it is more difficult to sell your product to a new lead. They tend to be skeptical. But someone who has been on your site before will have their guard down.
Also interesting: You Are Wasting Money with Your Google Ads Campaign but Here’s a Fix
The solution is straightforward. Keep showing your ad to leads who have interacted with your ad before. If they are truly curious, they will click again and eventually make the purchase.
Following this line of thought, I suggest using
- a conversion tracker tool that tracks visitors through a conversion code embedded in the click;
- a discount code as a conversion id to understand which ads led to a conversion action;
- segmented lists to remarket to people based on their previously visited landing pages; and
- personalizing the ad based on the visitor’s previous activity on the landing page.
5. Leave it to an expert PPC agency
All the above-given techniques work like magic, but only in the hands of a magician. Do you catch the drift? In layman’s terms, you need to have some prior expertise in digital marketing. Otherwise, you cannot even comprehend the complexity, let alone implement, some of these steps. It’s not as easy as pie, I’m afraid.
You have two options now. Either ride the learning curve, which usually takes a few years, or hire experts to do this task for you. I suggest you take the latter path. Ensure that every cent you spend goes towards a successful PPC conversion. Let us explain how. By “hiring experts,” I mean working with an established PPC agency to handle all your Google ad campaigns. This is how it’ll benefit you:
- A PPC agency saves precious time. You don’t need to spend your time analyzing and optimizing your ad campaign.
- A PPC agency proves cheaper than housing a marketing team. You save on everything from office space to salaries and employee benefits.
- Positive results are guaranteed. PPC agencies employ the most talented digital marketers out there. They know what they’re doing. They are also bound to provide you with the results they promised since you are a valuable client.
- You get the precision that comes with industry experience. PPC agency experts are in tune with digital marketing trends. They can detect and fix broken links in your ad campaign instantaneously. An in-house digital marketing team would need years of training to achieve the same efficiency.
Now it’s up to you. You can take the short and safe path to invest your time better developing valuable products and services. Or you can take the long and troublesome way if you genuinely want to establish your brand’s marketing division – To each their own.
YouTube: Conversion tracking in Google Ads
Author: Sheryl Pranjli is the Sr. Marketing Specialist at Email Uplers, who has great experience in designing well-defined user journeys across the digital marketing domain. She leverages her digital marketing expertise to help businesses draw significant ROIs.
Photo credit: The feature image has been done by Maksim Chernyshev. The photo with the person in front of a desktop computer was taken by Gili Dailes. The shot showing paper planes was prepared by Bernardo Ramonfaur.
This guest article has been submitted by Kevin George. While we appreciate guest contributions, it's important to note that the views expressed by the author are not necessarily reflective of those held by TechAcute.
