5 Ways to Increase CTR and Conversions in Adwords

There are 5 Key T’s of PPC.

You’ve probably seen numerous articles on the ‘top 10 tools to use for email marketing’, the ‘7 essential steps for an effective content marketing strategy’, or the ‘5 best practises for digital marketing’… but the 5 T’s of PPC? Probably not.

Here’s our guide to the 5 T’s to help you to get the best from your PPC Campaign.

1. Time

One of the easiest and most useful dimensions to analyse is time. By looking across historic data filtered by hour of day, or day of the week, you can see where budget can be reserved or increased dependent on a number of factors.

Historically, how many conversions have you had during the middle of the night? If you are B2B, how many conversions did you get on a Sunday? If the answer is none, or very few, but the cost per click (CPC) is not significantly lower during these times, then why not save this budget.

You’re best to reinvest what you would have spent during these times in times where competition has been at its highest, or apply to a time of day which already has a high conversion rate/low cost per conversion to see if you can increase this further.

To manage the times your ads show, and to manage your budget in line with this, simply go to the settings tab, and select ad schedule.

Then select bid adjustment, and apply your budget according to the times of day and days of the week you want it to increase, decrease, or stop altogether.

2. Trust

You might well have a fantastic product at a great price, you might have a website full of customers singing your praises, but how do users know that they can trust you before they click on your ad and cost you money?

According to the stats:

• 50 or more reviews per product can mean a 4.6% increase in conversion rates. (Reevoo)
• Site visitors who interact with both reviews and customer questions and answers are 105% more likely to purchase while visiting, and spend 11% more than visitors who don’t interact with user generated content. (Bazaarvoice)
• Reviews produce an average 18% uplift in sales. (Reevoo)85% of customers proceed to buy only after reading online reviews. (MarketingProfs)
• 63% of customers prefer to buy from sites that have product ratings and reviews (MarketingProfs).What does this mean for PPC?
• Google is reporting that users are 5-10% more likely to click on paid ads with +1 annotations
• Google is reporting that users are 17% more likely to click on paid ads with star ratings

There are two great tools that can help you out here. One is the review extensions, which allow you to show snippets or paraphrased reviews alongside your ads, and the other is getting Google to recognise reviews from your site through the use of rich snippets, which in turn can help you to meet the requirements for star ratings to appear in your ads.

Getting a review extension to show can be tricky. The quoted reviewer name must match the site URL and must be from a “reputable third party reviewer”. In addition the review must be from the last year and must be taken directly from the Original review source. If you find Google disapproved your review extension check their Best Practices page for a list of common problems which can stop your extension from showing.

The second way of reassuring a user that they can trust you is a star rating. This may appear in your ads automatically, providing you meet the following criteria:

For star ratings to appear, your business must have at least 150 unique seller reviews (up from 30 ratings required a few months ago), each from the past 12 months and have an average rating of 4 stars or more.

These star ratings, aggregated from review sites all around the web, allow people to find merchants that are highly recommended by online shoppers like them.

If your site has lots of reviews that you want to include in this aggregated data, use webmaster tools to mark up content with rich snippets, which will enable Google to identify reviews on your site.

More information on how to do this can be found here:

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=146645

So get yourself an Industry Review, and start researching ways to encourage users to leave positive feedback!

3. Tracking

Google Analytics data is great for measuring how many users converted after clicking an ad, but what if once they reach your site, they decide to pick up the phone and call you to make a purchase, rather than completing a purchase through your payment form (which also happens to contain all that lovely tracking code)…

One solution is to implement call tracking. Call tracking enables you to see the date and time of calls and compare enquiries from different channels to see which campaigns are generating the most conversions.

4. Testing

Testing should always be an integral part of any PPC campaign, but don’t fall into the trap of tweaking this and tweaking that; no testing should be based on ‘change this bit and see what happens’.

It might take you a while, but if you take time to analyse your AdWords campaign data in Google Analytics, you can set up far more effective A/B testing. Remember, to get the best results from these tests, set your campaign to rotate evenly in the ad delivery settings to prevent Google from serving ads more likely to get clicks or conversions.

If your site has more than one offer or promotion running, test which one is more appealing and include variations of the winner in future campaigns!

Also remember to look at your reverse goal path to see if users are converting straight from the landing page you send them to. You may be surprised to find that they prefer to start off on the homepage and navigate from there, or convert on an even deeper page on your site.

5. Temptation

Persuading a potential user to click on your ad when they aren’t yet ready to convert can be very challenging. In general, more generic searches are associated with users performing research.

So why waste budget on serving your ad to them at all?

Rather than using a bland call to action that doesn’t offer any incentive to the user such as ‘Sign Up’, use a mix of personalisation and enticing ad copy coupled with an inviting call to action like ‘Get Offers’ or ‘Get Quote’ to tempt the user.