It can be very easy to fall for the latest shiny marketing tools and strategies instead of working with what we already have, I know we’re guilty of it! But let’s face it, the grass always looks greener on the other side… but have you ever spent time digging into your existing campaigns and carrying out Conversion Rate Optimisation?
Conversion Rate Optimisation is all about delving deep into your existing marketing campaigns and getting even more out of them.
People often fall into the trap of thinking a brand new marketing tool or strategy will deliver instant results to their sales, but in reality you stand far more chance of improving turnover by optimising what you already have.
Let’s take Google Ads for instance… even if your campaign has low conversions, it usually has a keyword or advert that is working better than others. Unfortunately, because it’s not producing a high level of sales, it is often overlooked. However, spend some time nurturing the campaign and it could become another high performer!
The same goes for already high performing Google Ads campaigns, you can nearly always get even more out of them through conversion rate optimisation. Even a small percentage increase can produce a large monetary benefit.
Conversion Rate Optimisation isn’t limited to Google Ads, but for now let’s stick with it as an example.
Optimising your conversions can go to immense depths and is probably best suited for it’s own article in the future, but the top-level optimisation can benefit almost any campaign, even if they have a high conversion rate.
For instance, over time your best keywords will rise to the top and the lower quality keywords will drop to the bottom. This becomes easy to overlook if your campaign is working well, but you should take these low performers away and either delete them or move them into their own campaign, as this will give more room to grow the top performers. Look at segregating the top performing keywords out into separate campaigns too, as this will allow you to tailor the entire campaign around those keywords.
We don’t just need to look at the best performing keywords though, we also need to see what the top performing search terms are that people have typed in the trigger the best ads. We can add these to the keyword list where appropriate and filter out the unwanted search terms by adding them to a negative keyword folder.
Next, take a look at the ads themselves and pause all but the top performers, then make different versions of these with new copy and test them in an A/B environment, to see which copy works the best. You can also point these ads to different pages within your website, to see which gives you better conversions.
Once you’ve carried out these changes you should look deeper at the website page that they direct the viewer to and measure how well they are performing. Use Google Analytics to help with this and maybe even add heatmapping software like HotJar to provide a detailed overview of the page and video of the users navigating their way around. There is almost always some page changes that can be made to increase conversions. You can also run an A/B test on pages to see which performs the best.
Although this article has only covered top level changes on Google Ads, the same conversion rate optimisation principles are relevant to other areas of your marketing, including web pages, SEO, social media, brochures, flyers and much more.
These changes are not too complex but they can easily add another 2 – 5% to your conversions, maybe even more! That’s what you call Conversion Rate Optimisation.
Conversion Rate Optimisation is all about taking something that converts and improving on it even more. We like to relate it to a seedling where although it’s only small and returning very little, given some time and careful nurturing it can grow into a large fruit producing tree that feeds you for life. But it takes some time, care and discipline.
It’s a system that really works, so if you would like some help or further information on Conversion Rate Optimisation, please get in touch.