What is Conversion Rate in Marketing? How to improve PPC Conversion Rate without Increasing Traffic

In marketing, the conversion rate refers to the percentage of visitors that take the desired action on your website. The better your marketing and web design are, the higher the conversion rates you will have. It means you’re putting the right offer in front of the right market and making it easy for them to get it.

Of course, increasing traffic (a.k.a. the number of visitors) to your website will add to your conversions in theory. However, if your on-page conversion strategy is broken, then simply driving more traffic won’t fix the real problem. In order to generate leads and sales, your landing page is critical.

However, once you do have your conversion rate nailed down, it is much easier to focus on generating traffic to it.

So now that we’ve addressed the question — “What is conversion rate in marketing?” — Let’s dive a little deeper to reveal the importance of conversion rates and the powerful, proven strategies to increase them.

The Power of Improving the Conversion Rate

One small tweak in your conversion rates can have a profound impact. For instance, it is possible to increase your conversion rate by just 1% and see your business double its revenue overnight. Let’s take a look at a specific example to see how the math can really start to add up:

Imagine you sell a product or service for $1,000, and have a conversion rate of just 0.5%. That means you will need to have 200 people on your website to generate one conversion.

If you are getting 1,000 visitors per month at 0.5%, that’s $5,000 worth of revenue.

1,000 x 0.005 x $1,000 = $5,000

If you double your conversion rate to just 1%, you also double your sales:

1,000 x 0.01 x $1,000 = $10,000

Now from the above example, you can clearly infer that an advertiser can double his monthly revenue just by tweaking the conversion rate. It’s the easier way to increase your business by increasing the conversion rate rather than increasing the volume of website visitors. You just need to convert more of the visitors you are already getting into sales and you also want to know the potential points on your website to unlock a massive increase in profits.
 
Now you might be thinking about the tweaks which can result in better conversion rates and increase in profit?

 
Now that you understand the true power of boosting conversion rates let’s look at how you can achieve it.

Customer Journey

The customer journey is essentially a metaphor to describe the various levels of awareness or readiness that a visitor has in the conversion funnel.

It encapsulates the entire timeline from being merely a visitor or “prospect” to becoming your paying customer.

Here are the three funnel stages, from top to bottom:

1. Awareness

Here, prospects are aware of a problem that they have, and they are aware that they need a solution.

In the awareness section, you need to start with a clear understanding of who your audience is. What do they want? Where do they reside? How urgent is their need?

Anything that helps you build a more detailed, accurate customer persona is key at this stage. It is a leverage point that will affect your conversion all the way down through your funnel or customer journey.

2. Consideration

After the initial stage of mere awareness, prospects begin taking action toward solving it by seeking out solutions and comparing them.

At the consideration step, you need to start optimizing the shopping experience on a more granular level. Aspects related to user experience, such as page loading time, ease of navigation, and general web design principles, come more into play.

3. Conversion

At this point, the prospect has considered one or more solutions and is ready to move forward with the best one.

In addition, this is where your prospect is likely to have the greatest level of fear and hesitancy. They know your exact offering. They know your price. And they know that they are about to take a risk.

All kinds of things pop into a prospect’s mind at this point. Will my friends judge me for this decision? Will it look good or feel good, be easy to use, or worth the money?

Trust is key in this stage, in order to nudge them over the line to buy your product or service. Using testimonials and reviews (for social proof) is essential to put their mind at ease and increase conversions.

How Do You Know What Part of Your Conversion Funnel Needs to Change?

Having a top-level view of total visitors and conversions is important, of course. But it’s not always sufficient. As marketers, we can use tools to understand the behavior of different visitors at a deeper level.

Consider using tools that offer the following features:

• Compare historical data to see which profitable keywords, referrers, tweets, locations, languages, etc. are associated with traffic to your site.
• Record heat maps that show you mouse movements and clicks to see which page sections and elements need reworking.
• See who abandons the process, and which stages.
• Advanced segmentation and custom events.
• Identifies users based on session data, cookies, and more.

 

Behind the Tools: What Technology is Powering This Data?

When adding a tracking or analytics tool to your website, it typically uses one or more of the following data points:

• HTML changes that occur when a visitor is on your page
• Clicks
• Mouse movements and hovering
• Scrolls
• Keystrokes in forms and input fields
• Changes in the browser viewport size

 

Conversion Strategies

Tools offering the above features can help you diagnose problem areas in your customer buying journey. But once you’ve got the proper analytics, you’ll need to implement the right marketing techniques to increase conversions.

Let’s take a look at 13 strategies that are proven to be effective:

1. Use FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) and Urgency

Everyone has FOMO when they feel they are about to lose out on an opportunity to improve their lives or solve their problems.  You can use this to your advantage by increasing their sense of urgency.

This can come in the form of offering only a limited number of items or enacting a deadline for your prospects to take advantage of your offer.

For instance, notice how this Google Ad uses a time limit to increase urgency:

2. Assume Your Visitor Has Almost Zero Attention Span

Attention span is getting shorter every year. By simplifying your landing page, you can prevent your visitors from getting distracted and bouncing.

Consider removing any unnecessary navigation elements, information, form fields, links, or media.

Remember that your visitor came to your website due to a very specific promise made in your advertisement, and if you lead them astray, they won’t have much patience for sticking around.

3. Show Your Product in Action

Have a strong image relating to your market. Ideally, you will have a primary image above the fold that demonstrates your product in action, solving the visitor’s most pressing problem.

4. Use a Clear Call to Action (CTA)

Merely putting information in front of someone and expecting them to take the right action is poor marketing.

Always provide a CTA that instructs your prospect on precisely what you want them to do to move the buying process forward. This could range from lead generation to sharing the content, to buying it.

5. Get Them to Bite on Your Headline

Your headlines, headings, and subheadings should be filled with concise explanations of what your product offers. Start with the most important benefit at the top whenever possible.

6. Remember: It’s About Benefits (Not Just Features)

List your features and benefits in a simple, outlined way. Bullet points are an excellent way to do this. Keep in mind that you should always tie the feature to a benefit. Instead of saying, “our smart-tech golf ball has a 4GB microchip,” elaborate on that feature by mentioning a benefit: “so you can record a full day of hitting stats at the driving range.”

7. Make Them Believe You

Whenever you can communicate credibility or trust with your market, you will improve your conversions. This comes in many forms. Consider one or all the following: testimonials, reviews, partnership logos, awards, and case studies.

8. Hurry It Up

It’s no secret that the modern consumer rushes throughout their day in a trance of distraction and impatience. A slow page load time can equate to visitors simply giving up on your landing page and never returning again.

Here are some ways to bring your page load time down:

• Optimize video, images, and other media
• Use caching and faster hosting solutions
• Use Google Lighthouse or similar tools to perform a speed audit
• Minify JavaScript and other code resources such as CSS
• Use Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) for mobile versions of your landing page
• Utilize a Content Delivery Network (CDN)

 

9. Adhere to SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Best Practices

Consider whether your traffic strategy revolves primarily around paid advertising or organic traffic. If it is the latter, perform a full SEO audit on your site to ensure that it is built properly from the ground up. This way, Google and other search engines will properly index and display your webpages for the appropriate keywords.
 

 

10. Use Lead Capture Forms

Sometimes, you need to generate a lead instead of going for the sale right away. This is especially the case with higher-priced items. By using a popular lead capture tool, you can automate much of the process and focus on marketing to collect visitor information.

11. Optimize Voice Search

As the world moves increasingly toward mobile devices and voice-operated assistants, voice search is going to be essential to higher conversion rates. Don’t forget the long-tail keywords and queries, as it is easier to show up and rank for these. You don’t want to compete with billion-dollar brands that have endless budgets.

12. Use Videos

Videos are great ways to get visual hooks into your marketing. You can go more into detail explaining your offer, your branding, and your key differentiators. It is also more stimulating than mere text or images.

The video doesn’t need to be shot with a camera. Animations and whiteboard drawings can work wonders as well.

Here are some additional stats to drive home the importance of using video:

• Click-through rates (CTR) increase by 300% on video ads
• Videos on your landing page can increase conversions by 80%
• 66% of leads are generated by video marketing
• 54% of customers say they want more video content

 

 

13. Make it Personal

Personalized ads are now possible. You can feed customer and market data into your banner ads to cut through the noise and speak directly to your target market.

Adobe found that 78% of users preferred personalized ads over generic advertising. Additionally, a Yahoo study discovered that 54% of people felt more engaged when interacting with personalized ads. And 93% of organizations experienced higher conversions when they personalized their landing pages.

Wrap Up

What is conversion rate in marketing? Everything, as it turns out.

Boosting your conversion rates can have a tremendous effect on your bottom line by generating more leads and sales. However, each layer of your site needs to be tracked and measured. This way, you can see where to invest time, money, and energy to optimize your conversions.

Of course, none of this replaces the marketing copy itself. Be sure to use the tips above to grab more attention, present your offer’s benefits in a compelling way, and ultimately get your visitors to take action. Then, continually test different versions of your landing page to ensure that it becomes a powerful, virtual salesperson for your business 24/7.

You can get more valuable tips for your landing pages from our blog post, Best Homepage Ever: 11 Tricks for Landing Page Optimization in 2020.