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“Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things.” – Peter Drucker
Effective PPC marketing hinges on your ability to spend your time, money and other resources efficiently.
Your Google Ads conversion rate is a crucial metric for judging how successful your ad experiences are at producing value and action from customers.
Often, this action leads to revenue and growth. So, you could say that conversion rate is how frequently your ads produce returns, which is essential in managing successful campaigns.
After all, you don’t want to lose money in your advertising endeavors.
This discussion will thoroughly explore the Google Ads conversion rate and look at ways to optimize this crucial metric using automated tools and other means.
Let’s get started.
When a Google search user clicks your PPC ad, the link brings them to a designated landing page on your site. The design of this page aims to facilitate a valuable act connected to your marketing goals.
Your conversion rate is the percentage of your total ad traffic that performs this conversion action.
Google Ads defines conversion rate as the average number of conversions per ad interaction.
You can calculate conversion rate by taking your total number of conversions and dividing that by how many people have clicked your ad.
However, because clicks can occur multiple times from the same person, some marketers prefer to calculate conversion rate by dividing conversion by the total number of unique visitors or new leads.
Conversion rate is frequently displayed as a percentage. So, many conversion rate formulas also show you multiplying the answer by 100.
For example, if you have 10 conversions after 100 ad interactions, your answer would be 0.10, or 10%.
What you define as a conversion is up to you and your marketing goals. Many activities could qualify as a conversion. It all depends on what you find valuable.
You may have multiple actions that are valuable to your organization, meaning that your conversions aren’t limited to a single activity.
That said, you must know the value of each action.
For instance, you may consider someone signing up for your newsletter and making a purchase to both be valuable conversions. While both are important, the purchase holds more conversion value than the newsletter sign-up.
Here’s a list of some activities that could be considered a conversion:
There are plenty of other actions that could also be considered a conversion. Again, it’s up to you to decide how you receive value from your site’s ad traffic.
With conversion rate being a great way to measure the effectiveness and efficiency of your ad experiences, it’s critical to know what’s a good conversion rate from a bad one.
In other words, you need a benchmark to judge your conversion rate performance. This lets you see when you’re converting at a high or low rate.
However, determining this benchmark isn’t always easy. There are many factors you need to consider.
The more you interact with your Google Ads data and compare results from different periods, the easier it is to discern what’s an acceptable conversion rate.
Now that we’ve thoroughly defined and explained Google Ads conversion rate, let’s start looking at how you drive more conversions to optimize this crucial metric.
Your landing pages are the final touch point between click and conversion. Before optimizing your call-to-action and adding new content to these pages, your first objective is to ensure that every landing page works correctly.
If a landing page is down or doesn’t load properly, leads that click your ads will just as quickly return to the SERPs. You’ll lose their business and still pay for the click.
Your website analytics will help you detect when a landing page isn’t working properly. You want to identify and fix these issues as soon as possible to avoid hurting the performance of your ads.
Ensuring that your landing pages are live and functioning is an especially significant concern for attracting mobile users.
Mobile devices have different screen sizes and function much differently from desktop computers. If your landing pages aren’t built to work correctly on mobile devices, you’ll have difficulty driving conversions from these targeted audience.
With the majority of Internet users utilizing mobile devices, this is a risk you can’t take.
There are two ways to optimize landing pages for mobile users. The easiest method is to ensure that these pages are built with a responsive design. This will adapt the page to fit the user’s device type. It’s an easy catch-all method for your ad traffic.
The other option is to create separate mobile ad campaigns and develop mobile-centric landing pages. This method will produce the best results but takes time and is harder to manage.
The content of your landing pages can be dynamic or static. Most pages are static, meaning the content is always the same. A dynamic landing page changes depending on the visitor’s behavior.
This is particularly useful in improving the relevance and cohesion between your ads and landing pages.
For instance, if a lead clicks an ad for “best new smartphones,” the headline might read, “Search for the best new smartphones.”
Now, let’s say the lead clicks an ad for “best smartphones of 2021.” They arrive at the same page, but the headline reads “Search the best smartphones of 2021” instead.
By utilizing dynamic keyword insertions in your landing pages, you’ll improve conversion rates by consistently showcasing hyper-relevant content to site visitors.
To drive higher conversion rates, your landing pages have to encourage visitors to take the desired action.
A clear call-to-action (CTA) achieves several objectives. First, it gives the audience a direct expectation. There should be a clear link between your ad CTA and the content of your landing pages.
If your CTA reads, “Buy new running shoes from top brands today,” potential customers know exactly what they’ll find on your landing pages. Your conversion rate will drop severely if there are no running shoes for sale on your landing page.
Your call to action also declares what your conversion activity is and makes a compelling claim to encourage visitors to take that action.
It’s a good tactic to use a large, noticeable button on your landing page to make it easy for customers to complete the desired action.
Once your ad receives a click and a lead arrives at your website, you need to keep their attention for as long as it takes for them to convert. Otherwise, they’ll click back to Google.
Content is king at engaging audiences and encouraging conversions. You want to give visitors all the details they need to decide and convert.
Photos and videos are a great content type to include on landing pages. They help show your products/services in action. Videos are exceptional at explaining complex concepts that audiences may need to understand to get your offerings.
You should also include reviews and customer testimonials. Audiences want to hear about your business from others. It’s a more trusted source that helps them decide whether to convert or not.
Part of improving your conversion rate on Google Ads is finding the most significant gaps in performance.
Bounce rate is a great metric to locate landing pages that are hurting your conversion rates. A bounce occurs when a site visitor clicks away from your site without exploring any other pages or taking any action.
A high bounce rate means that many visitors aren’t finding the page useful. Thus, they are not converting.
Reducing this measure will net you more conversions. Plus, it will improve your overall website experience by ensuring there are no weak, misleading or incomplete pages.
Crafting landing pages with high conversion rates is an ongoing effort. There is no perfect recipe proven to work 100% of the time. You have to test and experiment to find what works with your business and customers.
Sometimes, all it takes is a simple word choice to dramatically improve your Google Ads conversion rate.
A/B testing is one of the best tactics to discover new ways to improve your ad experiences. This process works by creating near-identical ads or landing pages and comparing the results of each.
For instance, you may want to test the effect of adding a new video to your landing pages. You split your ad traffic between the existing page and a new one that includes the video.
Then, it’s a simple matter of seeing whether the video improved your conversion rates or not.
Maximizing the number of conversions you receive will improve your conversion rate. However, it’s not the only thing that matters. As covered earlier, you also have to consider the value of each conversion.
Conversion value is particularly important when you want to track multiple actions or your products have substantial price differentials.
It is far easier to convince someone to sign up for a free newsletter or spend a couple of dollars than to entice them to make a substantial purchase and spend hundreds. This will skew your conversion rates.
You could have a campaign with a relatively low conversion rate because the conversion value is higher.
In short, you don’t want to make decisions or campaign optimization choices based on conversion rate alone. You also have to incorporate other data to see the complete view of your Google Ads performance.
There are many methods and steps you can take to improve your conversion rates in Google Ads. But, how do you know which steps to take first?
As a marketer, your time is limited. You have countless duties and responsibilities to manage. Thus, finding ways to spend less time on tasks, while still achieving the same (or better) results, is a huge win.
Marketing automation software is the key to getting more done in less time, especially managing and optimizing your data.
This section will explore PPC Signal, an automated PPC management solution that makes optimizing your Google Ads conversion rate incredibly easy and consistent.
PPC Signal is one of the best PPC optimization tools because of how it simplifies the otherwise complex nature of your Google Ads account data.
Without automated marketing software, you’ll spend countless hours just sifting through your data to find the parts that really matter. Not to mention the additional time you spend actually analyzing your campaigns and detecting changes.
PPC Signal does all this for you.
The intuitive, easy-to-use dashboard catalogs all of the current, significant changes occurring across your Google Ads account.
Thanks to the automated PPC Signal system, you can stay on top of shifts, trends, anomalies and other patterns in your data, without having to detect them firsthand.
PPC Signal’s sophisticated AI-based engine works faster and more effectively than manual analysis, giving you deeper and more accurate insights.
As mentioned, marketers spend an inordinate amount of time studying spreadsheets to find the most relevant and valuable bits of campaign data.
Across the hundreds (sometimes thousands) of columns and rows, it can be hard to focus on the right ones. There’s so much other stuff that can get in the way and distract you from the crucial data you need.
PPC Signal makes it easy to filter out this unimportant stuff, until only the most valuable details remain.
Along the left side of the dashboard are multiple filtering options that you can use to remove irrelevant intel. You can filter by:
Since we’re talking about Google Ads conversion rate, let’s see how PPC Signal helps you find changes to this key metric.
First, you’ll select the metric type filter. Then, you’ll check “Conversion Rate” in the expanded menu.
Applying this filter will remove any active signals that don’t pertain to conversion rate. This feature makes it incredibly easy to focus on the detailed insights you want to investigate.
PPC Signal is a better way to optimize your Google Ads campaigns and manage your data.
Other Google Ads tools promise to provide you with valuable insights, but they end up under-delivering. What you end up with are incomplete insights that don’t give you the complete picture you need to take action.
With unfinished insights, you have to perform additional analysis to complete it. This is time out of your day that you could spend improving your conversion rates and other performance metrics.
PPC Signal saves you from the needless waste of time and other resources by only providing complete, vetted insights.
Each signal answers the what, where, when, why and how, giving you all the details you need to fully understand the change and take the right action.
You can click Explore to investigate further and see a more expanded view of the data.
In this menu, there are additional features to help you engage with your data and plot the best course of action. You can even make some changes to your Google Ads account in the tool itself.
From raw data to action, PPC Signal is with you the entire journey.
Google Ads boasts how easy it is to build a positive ROI on the platform. Yet, you may be struggling to establish a competitive edge in the hyper-competitive PPC space.
The challenge is consistently identifying ways to improve your results and increase your conversion rate.
Often, people spend days digging through data to find changes and analyzing the information to acquire actionable intelligence. This means that positive improvements to your Google Ads account only occur once or twice a week.
The simple process of using PPC Signal makes it effortless to make positive growth part of your daily routine.
With a steady stream of action-ready insights always available, all you have to do is decide which insights you want to explore and what steps to take.
Even if you commit to resolving just one or two signals a day, you’ll accumulate an unbeatable advantage!
The average conversion rate is just under 4% on the ad network. Reasonably, anything higher than that benchmark could be considered a “good” conversion rate for Google Ads. To get a more accurate idea of what a good conversion rate might be for your business, look for industry-specific benchmarks that other companies publish.
It really depends on your business, margins, competition and the types of products/services you provide. If you’re selling high-end electronics that start at $2,000, then spending $50 on each conversion isn’t so bad. But, if your conversion value is low, then you also need to keep your cost per conversion low. Otherwise, you could produce a negative ROI!
Conversion rate is a relatively simple measure that looks at how likely an ad interaction will result in a conversion. A fast way to calculate the conversion rate is to take your clicks and divide them by your conversions.
Conversion rate is always displayed as a percentage. A conversion rate of 5% means that roughly 5 out of every 100 clicks or unique visitors will convert.
Optimizing your Google Ads conversion rate is a vital factor in successful PPC marketing. It tightens your bottom of the funnel to ensure that you’re receiving a great return on your ad spend.
It’s an ongoing effort that requires you to constantly adjust your campaigns and strategies to unlock new ways to maximize your conversions.
However, raising your conversions to the ceiling takes a lot of time, effort and a close watch on your data.
PPC Signal’s automated insight system makes it exceptionally fast and simple to detect changes in your account’s conversion rates, even at the keyword level.
You’ll mitigate potential losses in conversion rate and capitalize on opportunities to increase it. And, you’ll detect and react to changes faster than your competitors using traditional PPC management practices.
That’s an unbeatable edge sure to help you achieve your PPC marketing goals!
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