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Understanding your conversion rate will help you assess the overall success of your marketing efforts. Conversion rate optimization is the process of improving the rate at which potential customers complete the objective that you want them to. It could be subscribing to your newsletter, making a purchase, donating to a charity, any action that you want a visitor to your site to complete.
Optimizing your conversion rate is not something that is easily done or something that can be done once or twice. That is why it is best to find a CRO service that can help you with the process every time you need them. In this post, we’ll explain the important points about your conversion rate as well as how to find the best conversion rate optimization service for your needs.
Most marketers are aware of what a conversion rate is, but may not have a tight grasp on just how much it can impact business performance, the cost of customer acquisition, and other aspects that are difficult to gauge by just looking at an ad campaign’s results.
Having a surface-level understanding of conversion rates is fine if you just want to plod along in your marketing, but if you’re shooting for real success, then knowing more about how your conversion rate impacts your business will help greatly when it’s time to find an optimization service.
That’s the first mistake a marketer is likely to make, if people aren’t converting, there must be something wrong with the ad campaign or the way you’re marketing the business.
While the type of ads you run, their placement, and frequency all matter in terms of people seeing the ads and knowing about your business, there’s a lot more to your conversion rate than that.
A conversion rate optimization service will have the tools to analyze all the aspects of your business to pinpoint key issues affecting your conversion.
We’ll break down some of the other issues that affect conversion so that you know more about what to look for.
As we said, there’s more than one reason why your conversions may be underperforming. Part of the process of converting is making it easy for the process to happen.
Sure, the first step in conversion is getting them to your site, but whether or not they follow through with what you want them to do is due in large part to how easy it is to get around your site and complete whatever process you have for them is.
Poor website design can mean a number of things. The first thing to consider is: Is your website optimized for the device they’re using? This plays a lot into SEO in general but the user experience is crucial to conversion.
A good CRO service will test your site fully and understand where potential leads are being turned off. The list of things that the best Conversion Rate Optimization Service will explore and test is nearly limitless.
One thing to note is that the majority of traffic now comes from users on their mobile devices. If your site isn’t optimized for mobile, you may be driving away a good portion of your traffic before they even attempt to convert.
Factors like image size, loading times, navigation, and ease of access all affect mobile optimization.
The CRO Service you choose will know best practices for optimizing for mobile so that traffic from mobile devices has an easy time accessing your site.
Another factor that often goes overlooked once a user actually clicks on an ad is the landing page. User experience begins at this point. Sure the ad drew them in, but the landing page is what keeps them interested in what you have to say, sell, or do.
The best conversion rate optimization services will test multiple variables to see what works and doesn’t on a given page, changing text and other elements around to see what converts more.
Whether or not you’re using dynamic landing pages, optimizing the page to convert is not the same as optimizing specifically for SEO. The most well-designed pages may not convert well due to certain elements. It’s important to have a conversion rate optimization service audit your landing pages to see what is and isn’t working.
You’ll want to have your CRO service on standby each time you change out ad campaigns and landing pages. Successful businesses maintain regular audits to ensure their conversion rates remain high.
As ad campaigns change and new content is added, you should be routinely checking to see if your conversion rate is up to snuff. That’s why doing it yourself would be time-consuming and extremely costly.
The best CRO services will offer web analytics to tell you how your site is performing and how to improve SERP ranking to drive traffic. Traffic volume helps with possible conversion and combined with conversion optimization will lead to much better customer acquisition rates and lower costs.
eCommerce sites can have a particularly tough time drawing in conversions if their site isn’t optimized for easy use. Having a poorly organized site, difficult to navigate menus, gaudy graphics and images, and other problems can severely affect your conversion rate.
This is not only damaging for an eCommerce site, it can literally end your business by having you spend exorbitant amounts on ads only for potential customers to window shop or get disgusted and leave.
Imagine for a minute having a brick-and-mortar store that pays its employees all day to have no one come in and actually buys anything, this is essentially what happens with the marketing budget of an eCommerce site that doesn’t convert.
Just like with other sites, the best CRO service can pinpoint your weaknesses and devise ways to keep customers on the page and shopping. They can test all the images, graphics, product listings, payment setup, and more to determine what works and what doesn’t.
Now that we’ve finished diving into all the conversion rate problems with your site, we can delve into how a conversion rate optimization service can save your advertising campaign and how they can multiply those ad dollars through higher customer acquisition rates and lower costs.
Just like with your website, many factors can affect your conversion rate when it comes to your ad campaign. Figuring out just what the problem is from raw data can be a frustrating mess, even for the best marketing consultant. That’s why you need someone with the tools and the strategies to figure out the problem and propose workable solutions to help you fix it.
Your CRO service should know the ins and outs of all the different types of campaigns to help you figure out whether your ads just need some work, or it’s time to reevaluate your entire strategy.
We’ll break down some of the elements so that you understand what your CRO service should be looking at and how it helps your business.
Whether you’re using automation or AI to buy ad space or you’re doing it yourself, the targeting strategies you use can affect your conversion rates. Having too high of an expected ROAS or CTR can make your ad spending ineffective at best and extremely costly at worst.
Expecting a 20x multiplier on every ad dollar spent when you don’t have the market share to get it will quickly see you throwing your marketing money away. The same is true for an absurdly high click-thru rate.
Another thing to consider in regard to targeting is the audience you are targeting. Ad space targeting is one consideration, but whom you go after is another. Web analytics helps you determine the demographics of your likely customer and can help you shift your market focus to perform better in terms of conversion.
An effective CRO service will have the means to address your targeting strategies on both fronts and help you reevaluate and retarget as needed. This is something that can change from campaign to campaign, so you’ll want your CRO service to perform an audit every so often to ensure conversion stays up.
There are many types of advertising on the web, but paid search marketing is the most widely used and recognized. Knowing how best to utilize this method and getting the right conversion can be difficult even for an experienced marketer.
Paid search marketing is the optimal way to market your product or service as users will have already gotten some idea of what they want when they see your ad in the SERP. The problem with these is often lack of oversight.
Setting up a PPC campaign that relies on paid search marketing and not optimizing it, or optimizing PPC once and leaving it will result in lost potential. Managing your paid search marketing on a regular basis requires regular audits and changes, often weekly.
This ensures that your conversion rates are always as high as they could be. The best CRO service will be able to manage your paid search marketing and keep it up to date and converting over the long term.
The best CRO services will actually actively monitor your paid search campaign and make changes as needed rather than waiting until your conversion drops and your money is wasted. Investing in the right CRO service can save your ad dollars and make you money.
There’s a lot of potential conversions from social media marketing campaigns. Ads that run on sites like Facebook can reach many more potential leads than other methods and as such can be a great source of revenue for businesses
The problem is that managing social media ad campaigns can be complex. For one, your targeting strategy for your specific market has to be tailored in the right way to reach the 1 billion users on the platform.
This means understanding how the platform integrates ads and shows them to users based on key metrics. Even an experienced marketer would have trouble analyzing all of that data alone. That’s where a conversion rate optimization service has the ability to help you manage your campaign. The best ones will have tools and software to analyze your ad metrics and target your specific audience better so that more of the right kinds of leads see your ads.
LinkedIn is a resource that is often mismanaged due to the sheer time it takes to target and market effectively. Generating leads on LinkedIn can be time-consuming, to say the least, and even a team of marketers doesn’t have all the hands necessary to manage posting, messaging, follow-ups, and lead generation.
The problem with LinkedIn ads management for many marketers is not the volume of potential targets, but the caliber. Much of the marketing done on LinkedIn is direct to business executives and professionals. B2B marketing is very much message based. How you would talk to the average consumer is not the same way you would speak directly to a business.
Messaging is much more key in this space than on other platforms. The added reach of being able to reach other businesses directly is worth the effort if it matches your market space, but the proper help is needed to do it right.
The best conversion rate optimization services have tools and automation to help you market effectively and convert on LinkedIn without hours of cold leads and wasted effort. The right CRO service will help you identify and communicate with leads that will actually close rather than typical mass marketing efforts.
The best way to gather all the information and metrics to see how your advertising is doing is by auditing your Google Ads account. The sheer volume of data can be a bit much to sift through, from your projected budget waste to your mobile strategy, CTR, and other factors.
The best way to handle an audit of your Google Ads account is by relying on an experienced CRO service. The best ones will look over every metric of your account and work to optimize the performance of the whole thing. Ideally, this is the place you start if you plan on overhauling your marketing efforts with a CRO service.
The best CRO services will perform a full audit of your Google Ads account and work forwards to develop a marketing strategy. Beginning your conversion rate optimization with a Google Ads audit can help to prioritize the areas that need the most attention.
These are most of the key areas of marketing that can benefit from a CRO service as well as what to look for when trying to find the best CRO service for you. If even one of these areas of your marketing strategy needs attention, consult a conversion rate optimization service to make sure you capitalize on all the business that could be coming your way.
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When you want to use paid search marketing platforms, Google Ads often leads the list. Because of its versatility, simplicity, and popularity, it’s obvious why it’s a popular choice. But when you drop all of your PPC advertising money into one marketing strategy, you could lose some leads.
That’s why some businesses explore paid advertising marketing outside of Google, with many turning to Linkedin Ads.
Google Ads and Linkedin Ads are highly efficient ways to market your products and services to businesses and consumers. But each marketing channel has its advantages and disadvantages. Whatever you choose, make sure you discuss the matter with your web development company.
Below is a closer look at each option.
We think it’s reasonable to conclude that Google reaches a vast audience worldwide – its ad reach is a stunning 4 billion people. Google search handles about 70% of desktop searches, and many companies report that they get about 90% of their organic traffic from the search engines. Also, up to 95% of the mobile search market comes from Google.
People use Google’s search a lot, and having the ability to target search terms with specific search ads is a massive benefit of Adwords. People tend to search for very specific things in Google, so if you can customize your Google advertising for your targeted audience, you’ll receive plenty of leads.
So, we can assume that most people’s targeted audience uses Google to some degree. That’s a massive advantage for companies when they want to target an audience.
However, businesses that want to narrow down their search may have issues getting their Google ads settings right with both Google Ads. And if you blunder when segmenting your audiences, your digital ad campaign could suffer.
LinkedIn features a narrower audience – 500 million users – namely businesses and business professionals. But this more limited audience makes it the perfect place for effective B2B marketing. LinkedIn lets marketers serve online ads to decision-makers and vital audience members in several ways.
Summary: For B2B firms that want to reach decision-makers, Linkedin is a terrific advertising platforms. If your B2C company intends to increase its reach, Google Ads could be the best fit.
When you target your audience with Google Ads, you have a few options: location, affinity, technology, buyer behavior, demographics, and interactions with your app or website.
No matter how much you know about your buyer, you may struggle to avoid clicks from worthless leads that cost too much.
In some cases on Google, people may not even know what they’re looking for. You can try to advertise to your desired targeted audience on Google Ads, but it can be challenging to get to the precise people who will most likely buy what you sell.
When people sign up for LinkedIn, they usually provide many details, such as their occupation, title/job title, experience, industry, education, interests, and more. All of this information can be leveraged for great advantage when you start your marketing campaigns.
Also, LinkedIn users can join many groups, start conversations, and obtain followers. The data is priceless when you want to target a specific audience and market to them. LinkedIn also has a Matched Audience that helps advertisers match their email marketing lists and website visitors with users on LinkedIn.
Many marketing experts think that LinkedIn Ads offer more value. LinkedIn has refined targeting, and you can make your product known to them so that you can tell them about something they didn’t know existed.
Summary: For B2B and B2C companies looking for a broad audience, Google Ads has enough targeting features. But for B2B firms that want to target specific groups, LinkedIn Ads has about 100 segmentation methods for micro targeting.
When you want lead generation, Google Ads has a broader reach and is the most effective. First, you can bring in a lot of prospects to your site without breaking the bank. The audience you’re after on Google visits the search giant with the idea to find the best product or service. This makes generating leads easier.
Getting leads from LinkedIn can be more challenging. Users of the platform may sign in to read industry news or talk to group members. No matter how perfect your ad is, viewers may not be in the mood to buy anything.
That said, Linkedin has a way to target ad leads through in-site messaging, which can generate plenty of leads.
When it comes down to dollars and cents, LinkedIn Ads usually are more pricey than Google Ads. As in Google, you can select cost-per-click or cost-per-impression.
LinkedIn also features a cost-per-send for InMail advertising. Typically, you’ll pay about $5 for each click, $6 for 1,000 impressions, and .80 for each send.
With Google Ads, the average CPC is $1. But to leverage that low cost, you need to work on your audience segmentation. If you don’t your ROI may be below what you want.
Summary: Advertising budgets for each platform depends on several factors. On average, Google Ads cost less than LinkedIn Ads. If your B2B company has a tight budget, you may want to focus on a limited variety of LinkedIn ads instead of a broad range of Google Ads.
So should you advertise with Google Ads vs LinkedIn Ads? Yes!
What we mean is, it depends. The correct choice depends on your budget, product or service offered, marketing goals, and target audience. You should not assume that when you need a digital marketing campaign, Google Analytics Adwords is the only choice.
It’s critical to evaluate the market, understand who your buyer is, and make a data-driven decision about the best marketing platform to reach your well-defined goals. One type of company might do better with Google Ads, and another may find LinkedIn Ads preferable.
The great news is you don’t need to choose between the two platforms. Many businesses use both, as well as Facebook, Instagram, and others. If you have the budget, it may pay off to diversify your paid search advertising to get the best ROI.
Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Digital marketing is a classic marketing strategy that’s commonly used to supplement organic web traffic, but it’s hardly the most straightforward way to increase your site’s audience. In fact, from a technological perspective, it’s a rather fussy practice. That’s why brands that want to include a PPC marketing strategy in their overall strategic decisions need to work with an experienced agency. Agencies facilitate ad distribution, track clicks, and calculate fees – and the best ones can help their clients thrive. Unfortunately, there are a lot of subpar agencies and bad actors out there, and you need to know how to spot them.
So, how do you know if it’s time to fire your PPC agencies? Keep an eye out for these 9 red flags. They could indicate you’re working with the wrong agency and that it’s time to make a move.
Companies leave their PPC agencies behind for all sorts of reasons, but according to a 2015 report by the Society for Digital Agencies (SoDA), the most common reasons include outgrowing the agency’s capabilities, cost overruns, and dissatisfaction with their strategy. These are all valid reasons, and ultimately many of them can be reduced to an agency’s failure to generate any or enough growth. After all, disliking the agency’s strategy isn’t likely to be much of a problem if that strategy is generating major growth. Similarly, a brand is unlikely to view itself as having outgrown the agency is their accounts continue to grow.
Ultimately, what these different reasons for firing PPC agencies demonstrate is that, any way you slice it, no one wants to work with an agency that isn’t making them money. So, while it might take a little while for your PPC ads to gain traction, if you’re not seeing growth based on the launch of or changes to your PPC campaign, it’s time to move on to a different agency.
While most brands work with a PPC advertising agency to run their campaigns, it’s not only possible but advisable for you to set up your own accounts with the major PPC advertising platforms, which include sites like Google AdWords, Yahoo, and Facebook. Still, if you’re not the most technologically savvy, it can be tempting to let your agency do it for you. Don’t give in to the impulse. Instead, ask them to guide you through it so that you can ensure that you’re the one with owner access rights.
Unless you have the owner access rights to your company’s PPC accounts, you can’t be sure you have unmediated access to your campaign metrics or feel good/ confident that you’ll be able to transfer your accounts to another agency or bring them in-house if needed. In other words, your agency could be misrepresenting best results to you or could refuse to relinquish control if you end your contract. You need to retain those rights and then give your PPC agent the appropriate permissions to manage your campaigns. If they balk at this arrangement, show them the door.
Typically, when you look at your company’s profile on a site like Google AdWords, you’ll see that your PPC agency has set up specific goals to help your business grow. These commonly include such metrics as Cost Per Acquisition, Return On Advertising Spend, and Cost Per Lead, though there are plenty of other valuable metrics that are worth tracking. Such measurements assure you that you’re spending your Digital marketing money in the right place, help you budget for ad spending, and offer insights into what’s working and what isn’t.
Unfortunately, you’ll occasionally encounter PPC advertising agencies that fail to set up these metric reports, and they’re not to be trusted. Even if they claim to be using an in-house system, it’s your right to demand they use the standard reporting system for each PPC platform and to fire them if they refuse to. Dashboard-based metrics exist to provide consistent measurements regarding the success of PPC campaigns ad those are the numbers you want to reference.
In a similar vein, some PPC advertising agencies skip the core metrics noted above in favor of less valuable but more appealing “vanity metrics.” Vanity metrics don’t help your business make money and they offer limited insight into your operations. Examples of vanity metrics include any campaign value based on impressions, engagement metrics that don’t drive conversions, and even many of the behavior-based metrics that used to be considered the gold standard in website evaluation, such as bounce rate or time on site.
Ultimately, vanity metrics don’t serve your company because they can be created artificially. An untrustworthy PPC agency might drive up engagement numbers by sharing a great meme on your brand’s landing pages, which will drive likes and other reactions, but won’t actually funnel clients to your site or create sales. Similarly, you can get a huge number of impressions by getting your PPC new ads onto a very popular site, but if no one is clicking on it, all you’ve got is a tally of how many people visited/ web traffic to someone else’s website.
Having the right metrics is important, but if you’re going to meet your goals then your Good PPC agency needs to be adjusting your account settings regularly to refine your campaigns. At a minimum, that means accessing your account to regularly monitoring and fine-tune the settings at least once a week. Such regular check-ins allow your agency to quickly adjust your social media campaigns based on updates to the search engines algorithm, catch any conversion mistakes that could cost your company money, and even react to competitors campaigns.
Be sure that you not only ask your PPC agency how often they access and update your accounts, but that you’re also checking your accounts regularly for updates. The reality is that, although many companies run PPC campaigns, only 10% of AdWords accounts are updated weekly. If your PPC agency can’t meet that standard, ditch them for one that will stay on top of your campaigns.
Just as your PPC agency needs to be fine tuning your accounts regularly, they should also be reporting back on your campaigns at least monthly. While seeing week-to-week progress would be great, as with many kinds of growth, this can be hard to evaluate. Comprehensive, monthly reports, on the other hand, can help you see what your agency has been doing on your behalf, how your accounts are growing, and allow you to be an active participant in your Digital marketing strategy.
Never settle for a company that doesn’t offer substantive reporting. While great reports may offer added insights from your account manager or more labor intensive explanatory work, the majority of PPC reporting is automated – any company that doesn’t provide it is just lazy.
It’s unrealistic to expect that you’ll speak to the same person every time you contact your PPC agency; that doesn’t even happen at your bank or your doctor’s office. That being said, there should be one person who acts as the lead on your account because that allows them to master your brand’s voice, develop a big picture strategy, and generally build up a knowledge base around your brand’s needs and preferences. They might be busy or out of the office occasionally, but anyone whose experienced both approaches – a core account manager and a rotating cast of agents – can tell you that having a point person makes a difference.
If your PPC agency doesn’t have you working with a single, core agent, you may want to ask a few questions to get a better sense of what’s happening. Do they have an unusual in-house strategy, or are they having trouble with employee retention? Do they think it doesn’t make a difference? You can also request that they place you with a single representative, but if that’s not their standard practice already, you’re probably better off going elsewhere. It just doesn’t bode well.
Google AdWords isn’t a new program and there are plenty of other PPC programs out there, but if an agency is committed to this work, then they should have complete Google’s AdWords certification program. You can check on this by asking them to show you their Premier Partner page – it really is that simple. Not having one isn’t necessarily the worst offense a company can commit, but it’s a good indicator that you can do better and should commit your ads spend elsewhere.
Did you pick your PPC agency based on their portfolio of appealing PPC ads/ads or optimized images? That’s a great starting point – it certainly indicates that they can do high-quality work – but it’s not enough if they’re not actually showing you your brand’s own ads before they launch them. Obvious, right? It should be, but many entrepreneurs have been duped by PPC agencies who tell them that their ad is similar to another ad product, which is called ad copy; the client, not wanting to be pushy, walks away with their own notion of their brand’s ad, and meanwhile the agency may not have done any work at all.
Your PPC agency should be giving you the final say on all your paid ads, so if you’ve supposedly got a campaign running and you haven’t seen your ads, ask to see them right away. Odds are good that if your agency isn’t showing you your PPC ads before launching them that they either don’t exist or they’re extremely low quality for online visibility. Great PPC agencies are proud of their work and they want you to see it. Anything less should raise concerns.
Hiring an agency to manage your PPC campaigns will obviously cost more than just the fees for the campaign itself, but the costs involved in running ads with your agency shouldn’t be confusing. That’s because, ultimately, your money should only be going two different places – to the agency and to the ad platform – and everyone at the company should be clear on the split. So, when we say you should be wary about confusing fees, we’re not talking about total cost (that’s a matter for you and your budget), but rather about how the money is split up. For any payment there should be the fee to the agency and the ads spend and it should always be obvious what the division is there.
As popular as PPC marketing is with businesses today, many of the agencies that execute these campaigns don’t do a very good job. They’re wasting your ad spend and your time, and you deserve better. That’s why you should switch to PPC.co’s PPC Management Service.
At PPC.co, we’re committed to ensuring that your ads are reaching the right audience and we know that most agencies just don’t deliver that. Starting from our understanding that website conversions often top out at 2%, we emphasize PPC marketing that pairs first contacts with retargeting efforts to ensure that your brand remains a top-of-mind solution for past visitors. A non-converting visitor is often just someone who hasn’t seen the right content yet, and we want to help you make those connections.
What else makes our PPC Management program stand out? With dual Google Ads and Google Analytics certifications, we have a deep understanding of the systems & AdWords account that get your ads seen and can use tracking data to its fullest potential of web traffic. In fact, that’s why we start every client engagement with a full PPC audit, because even when we’re not leading the campaigns, our skilled professionals can quickly see what’s working and what’s falling short in your current campaigns. From the start, we put our expertise to work for you.
If your PPC agency has exhibited any of the above warning signs, you can’t afford to wait around for progress. It’s time for the protection of business and moves on – to PPC.co. Contact us today to learn more about our PPC Management Services and say goodbye to wasted ad spend and rock bottom conversions. Once you’ve seen the difference a top PPC agency can make in your campaigns, you’ll never believe you let anyone else handle your PPC needs.
