As internet marketers, we constantly look for the ways to improve our campaigns and make a valuable investment. In other words, the goal is to achieve the highest amount of visitors to improve your CTR and conversion rates in your Google’s Adwords. This way you get to increase your profits from sales without raising your advertising spend. So, in this post, I am going to focus specifically on how to increase Google AdWords conversion rate.
But before we get started, let’s know about the term, ‘Google AdWords’, its increasing popularity and why it is important for your business.
What is Google AdWords?
Google AdWords is a pay-per-click service on Google that places your advertising copy above the organic search results. The way Google AdWords works is simple. People use a search term (or keyword) to search for a product or a service, if the keywords you’ve selected match what people search for – Google displays your paid ads at the very top or bottom of the page. So every time someone clicks on your ad, they’ll go to your website to learn more or make a purchase.
The Increasing Popularity of Google AdWords
Let’s face it. Google AdWords is becoming one of the great ways to drive sales and leads. If you see the trend of the term ‘what is Google Adwords’ over the last 13 years, it has been tremendously growing as more and more businesses are coming online. According to statistics, from July 2004- July 2017, the search volume of ‘Adwords’ Google trends has increased from 17-78. It shows that more and more people are incorporating this technique in their business.
Why is Google AdWord Important for your Business?
As Google is the largest search engine, so the more effectively you use it, the more benefits you’ll reap. Google AdWords helps in bringing huge per click traffic through the use of right keywords. Keywords are search terms that when put in the search box display results relevant to that search. But only the top search results with Google AdWords have greater chances of clicks and visits.
Google AdWords’ has sophisticated tools with features such as location targeting that allows advertisers to customize ads per location. Unlike other marketing strategies, in Google AdWords, you only pay when someone clicks on your ad. This means you’ll be able to maximize your ROI with a pretty clear picture and best results.
Now you know the importance of Google AdWords, let’s learn how to increase Google AdWords conversions rate.
How to Increase Google AdWords Conversions Rate?
With millions of searches every day, Google AdWords offers business owners a unique opportunity to convert these users into leads and customers. In fact, you may be surprised by the fact that, “businesses make on average $3 in revenue for every $1.3 they spend on AdWords.”
However, the above fact may instigate you. But still, the decision to use Google AdWords may sound risky to some people. As people are worried about the added costs of using Google AdWords. One of the most commonly asked question among them is, how that expenditure will cut into their existing profits? If you’re also scared about getting undesirable results through increased cost per clicks resulting in an over budget, then just make a few simple adjustments mentioned here.
1. Improve Ads Quality Score
Google uses a quality score to measure if your ad is eligible to be displayed in search results, at what position it will be displayed, and how much you’ll pay for each click. It is not the only key indicator of your previous PPC campaigns, but it also predicts the performance of your future campaigns. Most importantly, improving your QS makes you invest less and acquire more leads and conversions.
Formula to have a good quality ad score = The relevance of (keyword
+ AD + URL)
These factors are used to calculate your quality score:
- Click-through rate
- The relevance of the keyword to its ad group
- Landing page experience
- Your AdWords account history
- The relevance of your ad text
However, no one except Google knows how much beach factor weighs in the quality score. But, every one of us does know that click-through rate or CTR is the most important of all. As when more people click on your ad, it strongly indicates to Google that your ad is relevant and helpful to users.
Before we get started with on how to improve quality score, you should know about your current score. Let’s find out.
How to know Your Current Ad Score?
To know your current score, you need to login to your AdWords account, go to campaign tab at the top, and select the keyword tab. Now click white speech bubble next to any keyword status to check your quality score. It would give details about your ad ratings, ad relevance, landing page experience and CTR.
The green box shows that your ad scores only 7 out of 10 and of course you need to improve it. Here is an example of one of the top performing ads:
This ad has so many factors that make it appears on top search results for a keyword Flats in Zirakpur.
Factors that Improves an Ad:
Use of numbers and characters
The numbers like 2, 3, 4 BHK making this ad stand out visually. Also, including the specification like a price of 35 Lac makes reduce clicks from the people who aren’t interested in purchasing because of its price or it may increase clicks for those who have this much of budget. So this helps you spend less on the ads that are not likely to convert into better sales. Moreover, the use of variations in ASCII characters like at (@), percent (%), plus sign (+), asterisks (*), and registered trademarks (®) is the very effective combination. (@) Symbol is the visually bold commercial symbol and does its job well. On the other hand in ads trademark symbol can be used because it lends a degree of credibility to your ad.
Call to action
In this case, this company makes it very clear with a call to action like the call at phone number to enquire. This means they want users to enquire online. People should know what they’re supposed to do. We can add Order Now text as well if a company wants to sell something online.
Attractive offer and benefits
People like freebies and Discounts, when you add influential price and add special offers or discounts then it makes ad lucrative and compelling one.
TIP: Improve your quality score to get lower CPC (Cost Per Click) and higher ad rank.
2. Quality Landing Pages
The quality of your landing page can have a huge impact on conversion rates. Always perform the series of split tests to test your landing page. This is important as your ad copy controls your click through rate and your landing page determines your conversion rate. So, you can’t ignore it.
The design of your landing page should be congruent with your ad in order to save visitors from the disjointed browsing experience.
Some common elements required for quality landing pages are:
Compelling headline
Your headline is the most important part of your landing page. It should resonate with the offer made in your ad and compel your prospect to remain on the page until your desired action is fulfilled.
Concise and targeted copy
Your landing page copy should be relevant to the associated keywords with that ad group. You must add USP, benefits, irresistible offers, strong call to action, and credibility to your landing page copy.
Faster page loading
It is the part of good user experience and it’s not surprising that page load speed also affects your conversion rates.
A high-quality landing page always shows up at the top ad positions with a higher click through rate.
3. Test Multiple Ad Sets
This is the best practice in Google AdWords and it’s always good to test at least two ads in a similar ad group. This keeps your ad campaign on track and allows you to test different ads so that it is easy to find out the highest conversion rates and click through rates. You need to make these simple changes to earn that conversion:
- Do A/B testing to delete the poor performer ad and keep the good one
- Change descriptions
- Choose branded and competitive keywords in your ads
- Advertise locally
- Use headline capitalization vs. paragraph capitalization
Multiple ad testing can really help you know what works for your targeted audience.
4. Remarketing
This is rare that someone buys a product on the first visit to a site. Thus, remarketing is the most effective ad strategy to increase Google AdWords conversion rate. It will send a reminder and pursue the visitors that once visited your site to finish their desired action.
With remarketing, you are simply showing the same ads that people viewed earlier. This can help them bring back to your site and increase the possibility that they’ll click on your ads and make a purchase. The proper use of tracking code can help you get back to your potential customers.
5. Quality of Creatives
Google AdWords platform allows you to use two kinds of online ads: Search ads and display ads.
Search ads
These are basically text ads placed above and to the right of the organic listings. So it should be designed in a way that it helps users know the clear purpose of your ad. Moreover, it should be relevant in context to your landing page so that whenever users click on your ad and jump to your landing page, they should feel strongly connected. To provide a great user experience, keep a synchronization between the text of the ad, design of your site and landing page. For example: When a user searches for “Flats in Zirakpur”, the search results will show like this.
The word ‘Ad’ in a box are ads and the results below it are organic search results. The conversion rate of your ad is decided on the basis of three main factors: relevance, landing page quality, and user experience.
Always try the variations in keywords to see which are working and which are not. Exclude or pause the keywords which get less CTR’s. try to bid higher on the keywords which convert better. This will help you generate more traffic and clicks thus increasing your Google AdWords conversion rate.
Display ads
This kind of ads offers you an opportunity to present your ad in a more appealing manner. Unlike search ads, these ads are displayed next to the content on blogs and news sites related to your niche. These ads need more attention toward various aspects like the domains where your display ads are showing, whether the color of your image ads in synchronization with the design and structure of your website.
Although display ads are expensive in comparison to search ads, it’s an easy way to grab the attention of users by infusing visual elements like logos and colors into an image that will make your customers journey a memorable one. Similar to search ads, display ads should also tell exactly what you’re offering and it should match with your landing page.
6. Right Selection of Keywords
Most Google AdWords strategies begin with choosing the right keywords. It doesn’t matter how moderate your keywords are, but they should be relevant to your site and ads.
Placement of competitive keywords
Usually a three-word phrase has the most competition as compared to a phrase with one or two words. And a shorter phrase holds less relevance to highly targeted searches. You can start by building full competitor keyword set. Modify your keywords accordingly to target even more specific type of queries.
Add Negative Keywords
Adding negative keywords is the best way to improve your conversion. If you’re wasting your money on keywords that are not delivering results, add those keywords to your negative list to let your budget last longer, decrease cost per click, and ultimately increase conversions.
Understating user’s search behavior is essential to maximize your CPCs and conversion rates.
7. Optimize Ad Budget
To optimize your ad budget, you need to review your clicks, impressions, and click-through rates with the help of Google Analytics. Let us explain in simple steps:
Define your target
Ask yourself these questions. Is a CTR of 15% enough? Is $3 per click cheap? The average cost of per conversion? It all depends on your target. So once you define them it’ll easy for you to compare your ad or keyword.
Link your account to Google Analytics
Enable auto-tagging feature in your account to receive the AdWords data in your Analytics report.
Optimize according to the hour of the day
With Search IS column you can identify the exact hour of the day when you’re out of the budget. You’ll find this option under dimensions tab. Decrease your bids within the hours that are not bringing the good results and create a separate campaign for the hours that do not have enough budget. This method is also applicable for different days of the week. Search Lost IS column also helps you know the percentage of potential impressions lost due to insufficient budget. Also, do not ever start your ad campaign on Friday, because the search pattern of viewers is significantly different during weekends than during the rest of the week.
Check your average position
If your ad campaign is not taking full advantage of its budget, try to increase the bid of the keywords with an average position 5. Moreover, check your 25 most expensive keywords in each ad group at least twice a week and perform the bid optimization accordingly.
Wrap Up
Of course, there are a number of other optimization activities. But the above list will at least help you set your budget in a right way.
These are some of the golden tips to optimise your Google Adwords campaigns for better Google AdWords conversion rates. I have successfully implemented these techniques for one of my real estate client. This helped my client to sell 80% of his inventory in span of just one and half year. I recommend you to try some of these techniques in your Adwords campaigns to reap the reward.