13 Proven Ways To Improve CTR Through PPC Conversion Rate Optimization

Paid ads have an 11.38% CTR on Google (Sparktoro, 2019)

And so the marketers are investing a lot on paid searches each year. Many marketers are already reaping the benefits from the high CTRs of their paid searches.

But! Are high CTRs always good?

The benefits enjoyed by marketers for high CTR is only temporary if their CTR goals are different from their conversion goals. Sounds confusing. Right! Well, to your surprise, CTR is actually more overhyped than it is worth it. Like you may get a higher CTR while offering some assured free goodies in your Ads. However, is that traffic of high value to you and your business?

Probably not! Because conversion is your ultimate goal and your paid search CTR is just the medium to navigate your customers to this end goal. It’s not only the CTR that maintains the growth rate of your business if not conversion. Surprisingly, 26% of small businesses and 20% of established enterprises don’t even have a conversion strategy.

Don’t be one of them. Read on to discover the pros and cons of pay-per-click ads, followed by the best tips for getting the greatest conversions out of your PPC campaigns and the most frequently asked questions concerning the topic itself.

PPC Marketing – Pros & Cons

Pros	Cons
It helps you generate quick and targeted traffic.	Paid Ads listing is temporarily effective as it will vanish off as the budget rolls out.
Provides you the ability to design strategic marketing campaigns, niche-oriented or seasonal/holiday based both.	PPC-oriented traffic is also temporary until the Ads are running.
Gives your brand great visibility and exposure.	SEO techniques provide long-term results while PPC offers fast and limited-duration results.
Perfect for eCommerce ventures providing the marketers with full control to launch, stop, modify marketing campaigns.	PPC is time-bound. Hence, fewer clicks than organic strategies.
The long-tail keywords used in the campaign helps in filtering out the irrelevant traffic.	PPC is vulnerable to click frauds from the ghost servers and market competitors using insane practices to increase your marketing costs.
PPC marketing always provides you with measurable results – clicks, conversion, etc.

But still how PPC concerns CRO? Well, CRO helps you optimize your paid search campaigns to gain the traffic that does what you want them to do on your site. Simply put, PPC conversion rate optimization techniques transits your high click-through-rate into the final conversion and boosts your overall conversion rate.

Since you know that PPC conversion optimization techniques are so beneficial, let’s proceed to learn the best practices that can help you achieve your desired goals.

PPC Conversion Rate Optimization: Strategies For Improved Conversions And CTRs

1. Select the language to communicate with your customers

While you post Ads to attract traffic to your website, you definitely look into urgency phrases, offer drafting, keywords, and what not to define the purpose of your Ads. But, is your version of draft communicable to your audience? Are they getting the purpose and message you ought to share?

Consider the example below to have a clear vision-

Hurry! The time is ticking fast… 

Or 

We saved your cart for you!

Although both examples convey the same message, the first example gives a sense of urgency and FOMO to your customers. This is what the power of correct language and grammar is. It helps you target the intent of your customers and not just convey the information.

2. Evaluate Your Target Keyword’s Performance

Remember why you’re running the paid Ads? Yes! Your main goal is to attract leads and convert them. As said earlier, there is no point in increasing traffic if that traffic doesn’t convert. Paid search marketing increases your potential traffic by bidding on the right keywords. Thereby, keywords traffic data analysis helps you to make better decisions while planning your Ad copy and maintaining a website. Also, the right keywords facilitate targeting the right customers.

PPC Conversion Rate Optimization: How To Find The Right Keywords?

Well, I’m not going into any details here that will divert your attention from what you were reading. But, I’d like to share the process our Ads team follows to run PPC campaigns.

1. Sort out the list of keywords relevant to your search campaign initiative (try to include all possible keywords that you may think are searched. Also include  the keywords from the frequent search queries to analyze what your customers are searching for)
2. Once the list of keywords is prepared, analyze their performance on Google Search Console to read the traffic data for each keyword in the list.
3. Next, check the shortlisted keywords on the keyword planner to analyze the bidding flow before you make a bid.
4. To avoid irrelevant clicks use negative keywords too.

3. Include Negative And Local Keywords

Many people confuse negative keywords with the words having negative implications to their meanings. But trust me, it has nothing to do with the meaning of the keyword alone. Negative keywords are the opposite of your targeted keyword. The use of negative keywords helps you filter out the irrelevant traffic and local keywords help you in gaining highly targeted local region traffic. 

4. Your PPC Ads Message Should Be Similar To Your Landing Page

Imagine a situation where you have created an Ad Campaign to promote the sales of your product, let’s take a facewash for example. Now you have run a campaign with Ad content as – “Acne Fighting + Skin Clearing FaceWash Gel”. and you have redirected the link to your skincare products section of the website. 

Now, the visitor who clicked on the Ad is looking for that particular product but you have navigated him to the lost world of all skincare products. This will surely annoy him to the extent that he might wish to leave you. That is why it is peculiar to concisely identify the landing page your Ad copy is leading your customers to if you don’t wish to keep losing them.

5. Improve Your Landing Page’s Performance

Be it the loading speed, layout, design, or CTAs of your landing page, everything matters when you’re optimizing it. The landing page is the face of your Ad copy. While you’re optimizing the Ads to get a better rate of conversion, you must also look at the performance of your landing page which actually plays the major role of conversion. A slow-loading landing page is a total piss off for the customers while too many CTAs or exit paths increase their chances of leaving your landing page. Hence, optimize your landing page’s design and content too to offer your customers what they’re looking for and to get the overall best results from the paid searches you’re running. 

6. Set Bid Adjustments

Ohh we missed it! Did you do the audience research before running the Ad campaign? 

If you don’t want to be in such a situation, you must analyze your audiences too and the device they prefer to shop. Since the data shows a high rise in mobile users, you can, therefore, adjust your keywords bidding accordingly. In fact, this method will help you save extra costs too. You can reduce the biddings for the desktop ads (if you have fewer visitors from the desktop and more from a mobile).

7. Use Ad Scheduling

Another fascinating method most people don’t consider. Ad scheduling is a pure delight for the finance department along with the marketing team. Why? Because not every day and every hour give the same results of clicks and impressions. Ad scheduling helps you to schedule the Ads to be run on the specific durations when you have the highest probability of conversion. These specific durations can be easily found out by referring to your previous data and stats. Ad scheduling is a time-oriented, penny saver method to get higher conversion rates. 

8. Optimize Your Ads For Mobile Users

Yes! As per the data revealed by Google, out of 74% of mobile users using google search for the product searches, 93% of the users proceed to make a purchase. This implies the importance of optimizing your Ad campaign and bidding adjustments as per the mobile devices to embrace higher rates of mobile purchases than desktop or tablets. 

9. Call Conversions Are Also Important

Many marketers still prefer to make a call to their customers besides running the paid Ads. they feel it gives them a better understanding of their customers’ psychology of the product in concern. The tuff thing here is to track these calls for later inferences. Therefore, to track calls as conversions, you can merge a call tracking software with your AdWords account. This feature of Adwords to add custom columns and call-only campaigns is a one-in-all solution to track and analyze the calls and web conversions altogether.

10. Optimize Ads For Voice Search

As the technology is growing, so is the way people use it. In the last few years, instant growth is noted down in the use of Voice Search technology. The more people interact with their devices, the more they make the use of voice searches. It is also observed that voice search queries are usually the long-tail keywords. Since we are discussing PPC conversion rate optimization methods, optimizing the Ad content in reference to voice search queries is also a better way to increase the visibility of the paid Ads. 

11. Shift Focus To Conversions From Clicks

A high CTR may look lucrative and imply a successful campaign. But, CTR can be truly misleading. It isn’t necessary that the customer clicks an Ad and leads to conversion every time. It may happen that they saw your Ad, clicked through it but didn’t make a transaction. Therefore, your focus should be on the number of conversions and conversion rates more than that of the number of clicks and click-through-rates. 

12. Leverage Special Offers

Offers attract the major crowd to your website. Therefore, putting on special offers is basically the different urgency tactics that you should use to create a sense of urgency among your customers. Customers always lookout for the most convincing and delightful offers. If they find one, they complete the purchase in most cases. Using time-bound offers in your Ad with proof of trust like running a timer or so gives your customers a panic to shop as fast as possible.

13. Test Your Modifications With Conversion Optimizer

All the changes implemented in keywords, designs, etc. require regular monitoring. And to even improve the click rates from users, you can make use of Conversion Optimizer. It is a great way to automate your bidding on the keywords that have higher click rates on AdWords and are most likely to convert. But, to implement this method, you must meet the minimum requirements,i.e., the number of conversions occurred in the past 30 days.

PPC Conversion Rate Optimization: Most Frequently Asked Questions

1. What is PPC Conversion Rate Optimization?

PPC conversion rate optimization process aims to enhance the overall CTR and to convince each lead to take the desired actions successfully. The process involves improving your conversion rates by optimizing the ads, landing pages, keywords bidding, etc. 

2. Why Conversion Rate Optimization is Important For PPC?

PPC is the quickest method to get traffic to your online business. But it’s worthless until it converts. Conversion rate optimization is the process to maximize the number of leads that converts to customers.

Conversion rate optimization is important because:

1. It helps you minimize the acquisition costs
2. Helps you increase per customer retention rate
3. Better revenue per visitor
4. Get more qualified leads
5. Gives you control over excessively growing PPC and other digital marketing costs.
6. Justifies and streamlines your business.

3. Why does Click-Through-Rate Matter for PPC Campaigns?

Google uses a rating metric called Quality score to define the cost, effectiveness, and relevance of the keywords and Ad campaigns. And PPC marketing campaign CTR has a direct impact on the Quality Score rating. Therefore, it is especially important to PPC campaigns. CTR also lays a direct impact on your ROI.

4. What is Conversion Rate Formula? Or How to Calculate Conversion Rate?

To calculate the conversion rates, you need to have the data – the total number of visitors & conversion count. Also, a basic knowledge of mathematics. When you have it all, just place the values in the given equation and you have your results in no time.

Conversion Rate = (Total Conversions/ Total Visitors) * 100%

5. What is a Good Conversion Rate?

On average, a 2%-5% conversion rate is considered good and is appreciable. But conversion rates do differ considering the industry type, market competition, etc. therefore, you might have a 5.7% conversion rate or even more which is beyond the mentioned average good conversion rate. PPC Conversion rate always has a scope of improvement and you must adhere to it with PPC conversion rate optimization techniques.

6. How to Increase the Paid Search Conversion Rate?

To increase your paid search conversion rate, there are many best practices recommended by the marketers and business achievers. But, to know what you implement is beneficial and you’ll get the improved PPC conversion rates, make sure to cross-verify the implemented changes with the 5 point checklist – 

1. Does this Ad and Ad content clearly state the benefits of my product or service?
2. The top questions of the visitors are answered or not?
3. Are the pieces of evidence to support claims included? (testimonial, endorsement, statistic, case study)
4. Is there a clear call to action?
5. Does this Ad use formats beyond text?

7. What are the Steps of the Paid Search Conversion Rate Optimization Process?

eCommerce CRO or conversion rate optimization is, precisely, a 4 step process.

1. Analyze your Ads and website
2. Choose the right metrics and methods to run your Ads and test the performance of your Ads and website to gain the information
3. Optimize your Ads
4. Test and validate

PPC Conversion Rate Optimization: The Continuous Process!

The PPC conversion rate optimization is a process to attain the potential benefits from each paid Ad campaign. This is not a one-time process to optimize the ads once and enjoy the results forever. Every time you place an Ad or run the previous Ads for remarketing purposes, you always have to optimize it to get the desired results for the market and continuously improving its efforts.  eCommerce conversion optimization for paid searches triggers lead conversion activities and online marketing efforts.