Improving Pay-Per-Click Conversion Rates for Storefronts
There are so many steps involved in seeing good returns on your paid advertising spend. So, first we’re going to assume you did your homework and you built out a robust campaign in Google AdWords and/or Yahoo Search Marketing, complete with targeted keywords, focused text ads, and a cohesive ad group structure. So, now that you are receiving clicks, how can you make sure you’re earning enough revenue to justify your paid advertising budget?
Destination Landing Pages
The page to which your ads click through—does this page either show the product matching the keyword you are using, or does it at least show a listing of products that match the keyword phrase? It is always better to send a user to an internal page of the site, rather than the home page for some of your less general keyword phrases.
More importantly, you want to make sure your destination page has a Call-To-Action—a Buy button, in this case—as well as a Related Item section to promote other, similar items. These are just good, solid, retail techniques to keep a user’s attention on your site. Utilize a sales price where you show the original price crossed out. Potential buyers can easily see the value they’re getting.
Read more about tracking and reading your results…
Tracking
This is such a fundamental element to an effective paid campaign that we must stress the importance of it. Being able to determine which keywords are yielding sales, and the amount of revenue from each sale, are critical to a campaign’s success.
There are two levels of tracking. First, you want to make sure that you implement the Google AdWords and Yahoo Search Marketing PPC Conversion Tracking Code. This code can usually be cut-and-pasted from your account right onto your order confirmation page. Once implemented, the code gives you simple statistics on which keywords are resulting in sales. For obvious reasons, this is very valuable. One way to improve conversion rate is to eliminate poorly-converting keywords.
Secondly, if you are using free Google Analytics (recommended by OpenMoves), you will want to implement Ecommerce Tracking. Such a tool allows your Analytics account to track revenue and sales data. This is extremely valuable because it’ll give you revenue tracking for the entire website—in other words, you will be able to track all revenue sources, not just PPC.
Other analytics packages have similar tracking capabilities, and will require some small level of custom programming to allow you to track revenue. With these capabilities in place, you will be well on your way to maximizing your ROI and improving your conversion rate.
Reading the Results
OK, so now you actually have some valuable campaign data to review. What should you look for?
Here’s a sample of one of our client’s Google Analytics data from the PPC account on Google:
This chart tells us that the source’s conversion rate is 6.57%. The average order value was up over 50%. Similarly, the per visit value more than doubled. Finally, you can see, too, that while PPC accounted for 2.66% of total site visits, it accounted for 6.5% of total revenue. These are all key metrics, and for them to be up so much is very encouraging.
Now, it helps to read behind the data, too. For example, we know we increased the budget by 300%. Thus, it would be hard to imagine not seeing a large revenue increase as a result of this. Still, the results were good, so we know that we are spending the money in the right place.
It is possible to dig much deeper than this. Google Analytics—or indeed any other robust analytics tool—provides revenue by keyword. This extra level of information gives you the knowledge you need to turn keywords on and off and lower or raise bids.
Summary
Building out a robust keyword campaign with myriad keywords and ads is only the first step to a successful—and profitable—paid advertising campaign. You need to make sure you have properly installed tracking to measure sales and revenue. Also, make sure your destination landing page contains all the accepted retail elements to bolster sales. Finally, you need to be able to read and react to the data that has accumulated over the course of your campaign.