It’s no secret that advertising is a huge industry, and it’s also no secret why. Advertising is one of the best ways to market your company, and that’s why some companies spend as much as 40% of their budgets on marketing!
However, advertisements are a real drain on your business’s resources if they aren’t effective. That’s why you need to be aware of your conversion rates. Let’s talk about how to optimize conversion rates for your ads.
What Is Your Conversion Rate?
If you don’t know what a conversion rate is, it’s the rate of sales you make on an ad campaign. It’s your conversion from a click to a sale (or whatever you want them to do), making it really important to your business. Every ad campaign will have different goals, so a conversion could mean:
- Buying a product
- Donating to a campaign
- Downloading an app
- Signing up for a newsletter or subscription service
- Signing a petition
- Adding a free trial
The way to determine your conversion rate is to simply take the number of conversions and divide it by the number of interactions your ad received. For example, if you run an ad campaign and the insights tell you that you’ve received 10,000 interactions with your ads, and you’ve made 200 conversions, your conversion rate is 0.02, which is 2%.
Why Conversion Rates Matter
In short, there’s no sense in paying for an ad if you’re not making conversions. There are thousands of reasons why somebody might click on an ad and not do anything else. That reason could even be clicking it by accident!
Don’t Waste Money
When you buy online advertisements, you’re probably paying for every interaction with the ad or every view of it. A pay-per-click (PPC) ad with a low conversion rate is money down the drain. Every time somebody clicks on your ad, you lose money. The only way to make up for that is by your conversion rate. Your sales will need to outweigh the cost of the ad to make it worth it.
With a pay-per-view ad format like you would typically see on video advertisements, your risk is even higher. Not only do you have to worry about conversions, but you have to worry about engagement. While the cost seems low on paper, usually between 10 and 30 cents per view, they add up. If you aren’t getting clicks, you’re losing money. If you are getting clicks but not making conversions, you’re losing money. That makes it double the risk.
Because of this, it’s important to do everything you can to maximize the effectiveness of your ad campaign and boost your conversion rates. Remember that a lack of funding and poor marketing are two of the most common reasons for businesses failing.
How Conversion Rate Optimization Helps Your Business
Optimizing your conversion rates will ultimately lead to a better ROI or return on investment. We don’t need to tell you that you don’t want to waste money. However, that’s not the only way it will help you.
Making more conversions will give you the ability to scale both your business, your product line, and your future ad campaigns. Once you know you have solid conversion rates, it will be less of a risk to pour more resources into your ads and get the biggest bang for your buck.
You’ll also start to develop a customer base. If people start making conversions, you can prompt them to sign up for email campaigns where you can focus on customer retention. Remember, getting customers is part of the battle, keeping them is the other. Getting them to make that initial conversation is a great first step that will then allow you to focus on keeping your new customers happy and start building trust and loyalty in your brand.
How To Optimize Conversion Rates
There are a lot of simple steps you can take that will add up to improve your CRO. While every business is different and will require different tactics, here are some common CRO strategies to start implementing.
Improve The Content Of The Ad
Believe it or not, the average person is exposed to over 5,000 ads per day. If you spend a lot of time on the internet, you probably have no trouble believing that at all. Ads are everywhere online and in our daily lives.
Well, that comes with one big issue for your ad campaign, and that’s grabbing attention. If your advertisement is just one of two thousand or ten thousand ads that somebody sees in a day, it needs to stand out. If you’re paying in the pay-per-view structure, you’re wasting money every time that you miss an interaction.
Your ad has to be professional, and enticing, and it needs to stand out from the crowd. Video ads are excellent for giving you extra time and attention to make your pitch to potential leads, but they need to be done correctly to not waste your marketing budget.
Use The Right Ad Format
Another important factor is choosing the right format and platform for your ad campaign. Some companies will benefit more from a PPC display ad, while some will benefit from something entirely different. You need to figure out what works for you.
A great way to do this is to examine the competition. See what kind of ads your competitors run, try out what seems to work for them, and try to make improvements on what you think they missed. That’s how you play the game!
If your business is a mobile game app, you’re going to want a video advertisement to showcase all of the features and entice your audience. That’s going to give you better conversions than a search ad where you only get to display text. Writing “A fun app where you throw a ball into slimy monsters” in a search ad is not going to entice mobile gamers the way that a video would.
However, if you have a business tracking app, a search or display ad could exactly what you need. A quick picture with a brief description of the app could easily be enough to entice your target audience.
If you sell lawn-mowing services, an old-school local ad in your newspaper and a post on the town’s Facebook page could be all you need to start making a profit. It comes down to the nature of your business and what it is that you’re selling.
Diversify
If your business could benefit from different types of ads, use as many as possible. Try them all on a smaller scale at first and start putting more resources into the most successful campaigns.
If you think your business will be specific to one type of ad like videos, you can still diversify your platforms! Lots of websites use videos and run ads on them for revenue and SEO purposes, so you have no shortage of options! That’s not to mention TikTok, Facebook, and Youtube’s video ad options.
Banner or display ads will be the easiest to diversify. Almost every website uses them. Google Ads and others will allow you to put your ads on as many relevant websites as possible.
If you use search ads, diversify your platforms. Google is great, but there are other search engines like Bing that you can use. If your company has an app, use search ads on the App Store or Play Store.
Market Research
Researching your target audience is critical for conversions. You need to know what it is that the right people want. Survey your audience, ask your customers for feedback, and get advanced insights into your campaigns to make proper adjustments and adapt to their needs.
Improve Your Landing Page
While your entire website is important for your conversions, your landing page is critical. It’s the first impression somebody will get of your website after clicking on your advertisement, and first impressions matter.
This could be the one thing the customer remembers about their experience with your website, so make it count! If they land on a professional website with a promotion and they only need to click a couple of buttons to lead them to the right place, they’ll be happy!
Improve Your Website
Improving your website’s user experience as a whole will ultimately lead to better conversions. If your website looks professional, is easy to navigate, and loads quickly, then it won’t pose any hindrances to your conversion rate.
Remember, most people are used to spending time on sites like Google, Facebook, YouTube, and other big names. These companies have vast resources that allow them to make their sites as user-friendly as possible, so that has become the expectation among consumers across the board.
If they have trouble navigating your website, if it’s difficult to follow, or if the pages are slow, this will reflect poorly on customer experience, which is critical to customer retention. Believe it or not, the average consumer will exit a page after 3 seconds if it doesn’t load in that time, so it’s critical to making conversions. There is no substitute for a professional website.
Prices
Of course, lower prices will lead to better conversion rates in the end. However, you don’t have to do that. There are other ways to make your price appear fairer to the buyer.
You can wait to show the price at checkout so that when they already have everything they want in the cart, they’ll be more likely to buy it. However, you do run the risk of alienating certain customers, which isn’t good for retention.
There are also circumstances where a company can sell things at a loss or even for free. If you’re running an app, remember that free apps can make money. The same logic applies to blogs and other online resources where you can take donations, ad revenue, and more.
You can also have sales going on for your services and post them on your website and in your ads. People love discounts and savings. Offer coupon codes or free shipping to customers and you’ll see a difference in conversions.
You can also offer bundle deals, wholesale deals, free shipping on purchases above a certain price, or whatever makes sense for your business! If you generate enough revenue to start lowering the prices of your products, this will also help you sell more later on!
Never Settle
Make adjustments all the time. There’s nothing wrong with never being satisfied with your ad campaign. That’s perfectly healthy.
Continuously look for ways to improve. The average conversion rate is in the single digits, which is enough to make money in most cases. However, until your conversion rate is 100%, you shouldn’t be satisfied. Yes, that probably means you never will be, which is fine!
Keep up with your market research, keep up to date with the latest trends, and make adjustments as necessary to your ad, your landing page, your prices, and your products! This will lead to the long-term health of your marketing strategy.
Keep On Selling!
Now that you know how to optimize conversion rates for your ad campaign, there’s no time like the present to get started! Keep doing your research on your target audience, make adjustments whenever possible, and stay up to date with our latest marketing news! If you need a hand with your ad campaign, give us a shout and find out how we can help you!
