Conversion rate is an important KPI in Google Ads. A high conversion rate is a sign that your ads and landing pages are relevant to your audience. Achieving a high conversion rate in Google Ads depends on certain factors and there are ways following which it can be improved.
So let’s dive right into how you can improve your conversion rate.
1. Understand Your Audience
Understanding your audience is important because it greatly helps in choosing the right keywords and coming up with an offer and language that your audience will relate to.
It becomes even important to understand your audience if you want to try different offers, design, marketing messages and content, and keywords.
There can be multiple ways to understand your audience however a good starting point is thinking from your audiences’ perspective. List all the problems you think your audience would be facing. For each problem, write down how you can solve it. This will give you an idea about what your offer should be and what language you should use in your ads and landing pages.
Once you have an idea about your offer, refine your audience by defining the below aspects.
1. Demographics – Age, gender, location, marital status, income level.
2. Industry and company size
3. Job function and seniority
4. Where does your audience spend time online?
5. What language and words do they usually use?
2. Choose the Right Keywords
It all starts with keywords. The more relevant your keywords are, the more chances you have to achieve a high conversion rate in Google Ads.
Don’t just look at search volume; pay attention to the intent as well. A simple way to do this is search the keyword on Google and look at the results (both paid and organic). If you see ads from your competitors with a same or similar offer then that’s a relevant keyword.
But don’t just stop at paid results and look at organic results as well. If most of the results are blog posts, and your offer is more bottom-of-the-funnel like a demo, trial, etc. then you may end up with a low conversion rate on that particular keyword.
Consider long tail keywords instead: Long tail keywords are not just great for SEO, they work well in PPC as well. Generally, long tail keywords are more relevant and have considerably lower search volume than generic and seed keywords. However, they usually convert at a higher rate because of high relevancy.
As a general rule, bid low or don’t bid on 1 or 2 word generic keywords if you have a small budget and your goal is to increase conversion rate. Start with a small set of high relevant keywords instead.
3. Pay Attention to Keyword Match Types
In most cases, different match types perform differently. For one keyword, phrase match might perform well. While for another, exact match might perform better. You should keep a continuous check on this. If a match type is performing at a low conversion rate, look at its search terms and add negatives. And if it continues to perform poorly for a long period of time, then just pause it.
4. Use a Dedicated Landing Page
If you don’t have a conversion optimized landing page for PPC, then you are simply wasting your money. Still, many advertisers use homepage or an internal website page as the landing page. In most of the cases, these pages are not designed for conversions as they have a lot of content, no lead gen form and multiple distracting elements (like the menu).
A dedicated landing page on the other hand is designed to convert visitors into leads and customers. A landing page in most cases has only one offer with content tailored to the query of the visitor and that’s what helps in increasing the conversion rate.
With multiple landing page tools out there, it is really easy to build responsive and conversion-focused landing pages. No matter what technology your website is built on, these tools provide an easy and fast way to launch landing pages.
5. Write Relevant Ads
Bidding on the right keywords is not enough if your ads are not relevant to your audience. Your ad should relate to the searcher’s query. For example, if someone is searching for hotels in south Delhi, then Hotels in South Delhi as a headline is much better than Hotels in Delhi NCR.
Then the language in your ads should also relate to your audience. Understanding your customer’s psyche is the key here. Understanding what your customers have in mind when they are looking for your service/product is what will improve the performance of your campaigns.
6. Align the Language of Your Ads and Landing Page
You can’t just promise something in your ad and not provide it on your landing page. Even worse, you promise something in your ad and provide something else on your landing page – for example, you promised a 20% off in ad and offered 10% off on landing page. Your visitors will be confused and ultimately bounce off and will result in low conversion rates. It’s a recipe of losing your money.
A very common example is taking your users to the homepage or an internal website page and not a landing page.
Even if you take the user on a landing page, the offer that you promised in your ad must be visible on your landing page without scrolling down.
7. Add In-Market and Affinity Audiences
Google Ads has this amazing feature wherein you can add in-market and affinity audiences in your search campaigns. These are audiences automatically created by Google based on its users’ interests and online behavior.
The best part is Google Analytics shows you details about which audiences are visiting your website. If you have goals set up in Analytics, then you will see which audiences are completing those goals. You can take insights from there and target the same audiences in your search campaigns and adjust their bids. At the same time, you can exclude the ones which you find irrelevant.
Once you have added the audiences, let the campaign run for a few weeks so that you can collect some data. Then look at the conversion rate of all the audiences and compare it with the overall conversion rate of the campaign. If you find any audience converting at a better rate, consider increasing its bid.
Make sure that you look at long term data after adding your audiences. A week’s or even a month’s data will not be enough to decide on increasing or decreasing the bids.
8. Use Bid Adjustments
Google Ads allows you to increase or decrease bids for devices, days of the week, locations, demographics and audiences. It is best to monitor the performance of your campaigns at these levels every month. If you find that your mobile conversion rate is low while CTR is high for a long period of time, reducing your bids on mobile may be a good idea (and perhaps look at how you can make the mobile version of your landing page better).
If you find that you don’t get enough conversions on any certain day, consider reducing bids for that day. Further, if get more leads during any particular hours of the day, you can consider increasing bids in those hours.
9. Add Negative Keywords Regularly
Negative keywords are those terms which you don’t want your ads to show on. The more you weed out people who are not your potential buyers, the better conversion rate and cost per conversion you will have.
The first place to find negative keywords is when you are doing keyword research. Keyword planner shows a lot of keywords and along with relevant keywords it also shows a lot of irrelevant ones. Make a list of those irrelevant terms/words and add them as negative while setting up your campaigns.
The second place is to look at the search terms report. Although Google has started hiding search terms data (that’s just mean!), it still shows some of it. Considering Google’s keyword matching algorithm, your keywords will match with some or even a lot of irrelevant queries. It is especially true for newly set up campaigns.
10. Enable Call Conversions
Many businesses offer something that their buyers want to discuss right over a call instead of filling out a form on website – For example a property management service. In such cases, allowing a way for your visitor to call can increase your conversion rates by a lot.
This can be done in 3 ways – call extensions, call only campaigns and call from website. Call extensions are fairly easy to set up and track while calls from website require you to add some tracking scripts on your website. On the other hand, ads in call only campaigns don’t take your visitors to a landing page. Instead, it starts a call whenever someone clicks on your ad.
11. Track All the Conversions Properly
With Google Ads offering multiple types of conversions, it’s important to track all of them properly. There are chances that you are getting leads from ads but because of tracking issues, you are not attributing them to Google Ads. As a result, you will start believing that Google Ads (or any particular keyword or ad) is not working for you and might make wrong decisions.
12. Test
It never happens that you launch a campaign on Google Ads and start getting the desired results right from the beginning. You will have to make a lot changes in your keywords, ads and landing pages to improve the performance.
So you should test multiple ads, messaging, landing page content, bids, ad positions, extensions, etc. to test what’s working and what’s not in terms of conversion rate. As your campaigns get older, you will gain understanding about your audience based on these tests.