Nicole Blanckenberg — June 30, 2017 — June 30, 2017
Navigating AdWords can feel a bit like taming a beast, especially if you are new to advertising and struggling to get those conversions. The trick, like with any PPC campaign, is to keep focused on your desired customer.
Whether it’s choosing keywords, creating landing pages, setting out your ad copy or Google Shopping lists, your ideal customer needs to always be front and center in your mind. Also vitally important is constant monitoring, testing, optimizing and tweaking to make sure you are getting the best possible conversion rate for your ad budget.
So where do you start? This week we’ve put together 8 hacks to help you boost conversions with AdWords to get a big jump start on those sales.
1: Power Conversions by Leveraging the Right AdWords Ad Formats
AdWords is not just about your standard search listing anymore… Pairing up your objectives and designed target audiences with the right format of your AdWords ad is vitally important for getting more of those juicy clicks that lead to conversions. So how do you create the perfect ad, in the perfect format, to get those sales? Here are a few hacks and tools you can use to do this.
Enjoy Dynamic Text with Google’s Ad Customizers
This dynamic tool is perfect for eCommerce stores running a variety of specials, sales or deals, or for those limited-time-only products. You can also use it – sparingly – on those high converting products to create a long-term sense of urgency for your ads. Here’s how it works:
Utilize AdWords’ Shopping Ads for More Conversions
Shopping ads were designed specifically for online stores and are proving incredibly popular for those stores with a lot of products. We learned, in our Google Shopping Complete Guide, that these ads differ somewhat from your traditional AdWords text ads, in that Google determines when product listings are displayed and what search queries trigger your ads by comparing your site, your bids and your feeds. The bonus of incorporating this format is that the clicks you get are more targeted than curious, and thus can boost conversion percentages on clicks. Here’s how you can set up a Google shopping campaign in just five minutes:
2: Get More Conversions by Tweaking Your Keywords
Finding the right keywords for your PPC is crucial to your conversion rates. Another important consideration is that lower CTRs on keywords can affect your quality score, which will affect impressions and therefore conversions. This means that cleaning up your keywords ensures better results for your current AdWords PPC campaigns. The best way to do this is by de-cluttering your keyword terms. You can do this by:
- Deleting or pausing non-performing keywords in your campaigns.
- Increasing budgets on highly relevant keywords bringing lower impressions.
- Adding negative keywords to ensure your ads are relevant to the target audience.
- Updating your keywords with fresh, trending ideas.
- Making sure your keywords are grouped and organized.
Here are a few tools you can use for your keywords revamp:
3: Drill Down Your Campaigns so that You’re Using Smaller Ad Groups
The more keyword terms you have in your Ad Groups, the greater the chance of your AdWords text not matching your landing page or product with perfect relevance. If you’re averaging about 20 keywords per group, you may think you’re drilling down your Ad Groups as much as you can. By keeping your Ad Groups even smaller, and finely segmenting your terms, you could be taking your relevance to the next level. This not only improves your Quality Score, but will drive more sales.
Let’s look at an example: Say you are an online store selling novelty t-shirts and have an Ad Group with dedicated keywords for Star Wars. This may seem nice and niche, but think about all the types of Star Wars t-shirts search terms that could be searched, and whether they will match the product or landing page. There are a lot of possibilities here, and by really drilling down your Ad Groups to, say, Luke Skywalker shirts and very closely related terms, you have a bigger chance of ad clickers being generally interested in buying what you are selling.
4: Your Secret Conversion Tool: Remarketing
If you are not boosting sales with remarketing tools, you are missing out on conversions big time. When you think of all the money, time and effort you are putting into driving traffic, not capitalizing on that traffic as much as possible to bring in sales is misguided. Some of those AdWords need a little more of a push, and remarketing allows you to get those cart abandoners back in your store. This is huge when, according to Baymard, up to 69% of shoppers abandon their cart. Looking to set up your first AdWords remarketing campaign? Follow this step-by-step AdWords Remarketing Guide and watch the video below on creating a dynamic remarketing campaign:
5: Optimize Your Landing Pages
If you’re getting a good CTR but a lower conversion rate than you’d like, chances are it’s time to reevaluate your destination URLs. There are a number of ways you can hack your landing pages for more conversion success.
Rethink Landing Page Design
Your landing page design can have a big influence on your conversion rates. The first thing you will want to ensure is that your landing page copy lines up with your ad copy, which lines up with your landing page text – ensuring that what they expect to be clicking to is what they get. Next, you will want to look at your CTA placement – is it above the fold? The best thing to do is to test your landing page options, playing with layout, CTA buttons and more to see which URL is your conversion winner.
Separate Landing Pages According to Segment
If you are targeting a broader market, try drilling down your segment by offering different landing pages for different audience types. This goes beyond ad copy and ad targeting, with the idea of making different landing pages for the same product designed for each of your segments. This is a far more effective strategy than designing and creating two campaigns that lead to the same landing page which doesn’t speak your target shopper’s language. You could drive more success by taking an already converted key demographic and segmenting it down by age or sex, for example. This could dramatically smooth out your sales funnel and bring in more sales.
Here are some landing page design tips to get you started:
6: Think in Reverse to Move Your Sales Forward
To get your AdWords at peak conversion, you will want to reverse-engineer your conversion funnel. What do I mean by this? First, look at your end goal, then consider the steps moving backwards – landing page, ad text, keywords – you will need to get the customers to this point. This may seems simple enough, but I can’t begin to tell you how many budding AdWords advertisers forget this simple yet effective strategy. You will want to look at it this way, starting at step 5 and moving to step 1.
Step 5: Purchase: What will make your customer finally check out? Think about what pain point your product will fulfill.
Step 4: Choice: What choices will the customer have access to? After the landing page, where will you take them to encourage them to buy?
Step 3: Interest: What will make them want to see what you’ve got? What does your landing page need in order to lead customers?
Step 2: Consideration: What will make your customer consider clicking your ad? What AdWords ad copy and targeting will appeal to your target audience?
Step 1: Awareness: What will make your customer see your ads? This is your AdWords keyword selection.
7: Don’t be Afraid to Stand Out and Be Bold!
You are not the online store selling what you’re selling. eCommerce is a BOOMing business which means, no doubt, you have competition. Do your ads stand out, or do they blend into the search engine crowd? You cannot rely on keywords and deals alone to entice the right buyer, when there is a big chance your competitors are offering what you are.
Take this web search above for example; which ad do you think I clicked?
For me, I found the third option most intriguing. It is important to mention though, that it is probable that I am the type of customer they are targeting, so remember to be bold while always keeping your customer in mind.
8: Have You Considered Income Targeting?
If you’re marketing your online store to the US market, there’s a handy targeting tool that you could be overlooking: income targeting.
What is it? Google explains, “Based on publicly available data from the US Internal Revenue Service (IRS), advertisers are able to target ads to certain areas according to their average household income.”
Why should you be using it? It allows you to target your products to shoppers based on their disposable income. For example, if you’re selling high-end jewelry, this will allow you to hone in on those customers who are more likely to be able to afford your products: higher income earners. Here’s how you can can make income level bid adjustments in AdWords:
The import thing here is not to make too many assumptions based on biased info, as this would be counterproductive.
How to find this setting: To find income targeting, click on the ‘Locations’ tab of your campaign and scroll down to ‘Advanced search.’ There you will find ‘Location groups,’ which will lead you to ‘Demographics,’ which will finally get you to income targeting.
Main Takeaways
There is an old saying that says, “What’s good for the goose, is good for the gander [male goose],” which means, what works for one works for all. However, when it comes to PPC, that is certainly not the case. No matter what tip, hack or AdWords advice you decide to implement, the important thing is testing, testing, testing to ensure you find the winning conversion formula for your brand, products and target shopper. There are some fundamentals though, that you will always need to consider when trying to boost your AdWords conversions, and that’s your keyword choice, ad text, AdWords structure, landing page and the size of your Ad Groups.
Have some traffic boosting questions? Write them in the comments below and our AdWords experts will jump in.
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