Advertising can be a worthwhile investment when trying to make your business boom. However, you need to take steps to ensure your money is being put to good use. Understanding the terminology involved and having reliable management of your marketing strategies will yield the greatest results.
At Squarebird, we help businesses to understand and optimise their ad campaigns, providing support you can lean on. Ahead we’ll be discussing what PPC and conversion rate are, why they matter, and how you can improve them.
Get in touch today to start your journey towards a better marketing strategy.
“Conversion rate optimisation isn’t a case of throwing stuff at a wall and seeing what sticks; it’s about methodically and logically testing hypothesis, either from data or from best practice.
This isn’t always quick or easy, but in time can lead to large returns on investment and, most of all, happy and engaged users.” – Will Shelton, Projects Executive
Advertising through Google with paid ads
The adverts you put on Google require a lot of thought to really make the most of. This particular branch of marketing is known as PPC – a form of paid advertising that helps put your business at the top.
What is PPC?
Also known as pay-per-click, PPC is advertising where you pay every time a user clicks on your advert in Google search results. This payment is taken out of a predesignated budget, and the ads themselves can be targeted as you desire.
PPC can be highly beneficial for businesses, as you pay only when an interested user clicks on your ad rather than whenever someone sees it (as would be the case in a pay-per-impression system such as Instagram or Facebook). This makes it much easier to monitor your ROI, and lets you know whether your advert is actually getting the right attention.
Depending on your business type, PPC can also be more cost-effective. If you’re conscious of having a strong ROI, or want to know exactly where and how your budget is being spent, PPC will be more effective for you.
These ads are most commonly displayed as search ads in Google search results pages. Unlike other ads like video or display, search ads put your post alongside other similar organic search ads, making it more natural and informative for users to see – encouraging them to click.
Why is PPC important?
If you’re working in a competitive industry with hard to attain keywords, PPC enables you to still have a presence at the top of Google. While getting as much organic visibility as possible is always the goal, it isn’t always possible, and PPC ads help to support your organic results and get you discovered.
Paid ads mean you’re willing to invest in being at the top of Google, helping you to interact with an engaged audience. These ads are great for consumers too – by increasing the choice and information available, you give them an actual decision to make on their buyer’s journey, rather than leaving them to end up with the biggest or most well-known brand.
Big doesn’t always mean best, and if you want to show you quality, ads are a great way to bring users a more local, personal, and perhaps identifiable organisation.
PPC works best in combination with SEO – find out more >
What is conversion rate?
Conversion rate (CVR) is a metric which measures the number of people who completed a “conversion event” against the amount of traffic on a webpage.
Conversion events don’t have to be conventional things like form submissions or purchases. They can be as meticulous as you like, including:
- Phone number or email clicks
- PDF or brochure downloads
- Scrolling to a certain point on a page
- Adding something to a basket
Since they can be super specific, conversion rates can vary greatly depending on what you’re tracking. This is actually a good thing, as it allows you to find and then optimise the point of the buyer’s journey where customers are losing their way. You can decide which events you want to look at and what pages you want to look at then on, helping you narrow down on the details.
As a note of caution, Google says that conversion rate for all ads is around 3%, so you should set your expectations accordingly. If you’re achieving this result, that means you’re doing well. Organic results are actually quite similar to this, with around 3% of website session leading to further engagement.
The impact of CVR on PPC ads
With how impactful PPC ads are, it makes sense to optimise your conversion rates PPC ads work best when you’re not only investing in them, but in your websites as well – and that is where you can make changes to help increase your CVR.
Having a well optimised landing page for your ads shows Google and users how relevant your services and keywords are to their interests. You need to make sure people like what they see after they click on your ad, or your conversion rates will suffer. This means that CVR impacts PPC by requiring all your ads to link to a relevant, well optimised page – informing both spending and strategy for your PPC ads.
At times, PPC can be quite a hefty investment, but in is a long-term strategy that can be both lucrative and cost-effective down the line. Protecting your investment means linking your ads to a good landing page with a considered user journey.
As marketers, our job is to ensure communications, landing pages, and adverts all have a user-centric approach – guiding users without making the journey jarring, and ensuring what we’re offering is right for them.
How do you calculate the conversion rate of your ads?
Your conversion rate is the amount of conversion events that are met on a page per 100 people that visit it, given as a percentage.
Google Analytics
You can usually see your conversion rates through Google Analytics, where you can define what should be tracked and how well it’s doing. These values can then be compared to Google search and social traffic, helping you see what’s performing best. The CVR of these should be similar – especially per landing page. If one is much higher, you should investigate why.
Check out our ultimate guide to Google Analytics >
Other tools
Other research tools like Microsoft Clarity or Hotjar can give you more insight, helping you understand what exactly users are doing on a page. This can feed into your adjustments to the user journey, giving them an easier time finding key information and converting.
What can you do?
Even as marketers, we’re often surprised at how little people consume from a landing page. Typically, users visit a site for 40 seconds to a minute, skimming the content and then making an inference from that.
Some steps you can follow to ensure users are seeing what you want them to are:
- Paying attention to your metrics
- Working out whether people are scanning the page
- Keeping the most important information at the top
- Tweaking phrasings to get people to get in touch, or scroll on for more
- Variations in messaging
- Encouragement to users
All in all, you should be trying to help people at various stages of the buyer’s journey, keeping them curious until the final click.
3 ways to optimise your conversion rate
- Implement passive and active conversions
Passive conversions are where users engage but don’t get in touch (such as downloading your brochure), while active conversions is all the other conversions like forms, clicks on your calls to action, and purchases. Making sure you monitor a spread of both will let you know where people are dropping off. - Measure where users fall off and optimise this step first
Once you’ve found where in the journey the problem is, you can move on to fixing it. By optimising the earliest, most impactful stages of the journey, you can make sure more people see it through to the end. - Don’t try and optimise too much at once
Even if you have a lot of places that may seem to need optimisation, you should hold back and only optimise a portion at once. It takes time for the impact of optimisation to be revealed, and optimising too many pages could result in changes that are actually detrimental. It’s best to make a change, wait and see how it impacts conversion rates, and then go from there.
Evolve your marketing strategy with Squarebird
By optimising your conversion rate, you make the most out of your PPC ads, and provide relevant places for your ads to link to – increasing the success of both your marketing and your business as a whole. To get there, you need a reliable partner to help manage your ads, monitor your conversion rates, and make the necessary optimisations to draw in the crowds and keep them.
At Squarebird, marketing is at our core, and we offer PPC services to help keep your business on the right track. Get in touch today to find out more, or check out a few related articles below!
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