Conversions/Revenue/Sales/Leads – Whose Responsibility Is It?

I read loads of great blogs across the PPC industry providing the latest news on new functionality and insights to help increase the performance of a PPC account. However I find it surprising there are few blogs that discuss post click optimization.

Whose responsibility is site conversion? The client, web developer, SEO agency, PPC agency? The client pays an agency to direct traffic to their website in order to achieve their business goals e.g. generate more business.

Once the visitor has been delivered to the most relevant page of the website it is the websites responsibility to satisfy the visitors need and channel them into taking the desired goal e.g. purchase, sign up etc.

An agency can gain monstrous CTR’s, 10/10 quality scores, record low CPC’s however these aren’t as important as conversions/goals, as clients will be measuring the success of their campaign by revenue, leads, inquiries etc.

The typical client will not continue to spend money with an online marketing agency based on gaining 25% CTR’s week in week out and delivering no conversions/goals. It is in the best interest of both parties measure the success of their campaigns by the clients receivables e.g. revenue, leads, inquiries etc;

Client – Happy because they are gaining more business.

Agency – Happy as client will stay & continue to spend money with the agency.

I’m in no way saying that optimizing PPC accounts for optimum CTR’s, quality scores, minimum CPC costs isn’t important – however this is only part of the strategy for achieving your clients’ desired goals.

Pay Per Click (PPC) & Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO)

PPC and CRO should work hand in hand across all client campaigns as it does here at Vertical Leap.

This involves providing consultancy based on the clients site good/bad to help them maximise ROI from the quality PPC traffic an agency is delivering to their site.

A decent amount of time should be spent optimizing for conversions/goals as well as quality scores, CPC’s etc.

Whilst not all online marketing agencies like Vertical Leap have the ability to produce content, landing pages, banners, I believe it is still the agencies responsibility to be recommending on-site updates to help increase conversion rates to maximize ROI from the PPC traffic being delivered.

(Please note that not all client goals are as simple as increasing revenue, inquiries, leads, downloads etc. Brand awareness is a big goal for a lot of larger clients who are happy to spend a lot of money to get their brand to their target audience at whatever cost. Other clients will also look at the lifetime value of acquiring a customer, therefore revenue, inquiries etc. will not be their primary focus for measuring the success of a campaign.)

Static Banners vs. Flash Banners for Adwords Campaign

If the client is after the conversions or clicks then Animated ads (Flash ads, animated GIFs as well or HTML5 ads converted from Flash ads) usually look more flashy and attractive hence it draws more attention but this does not guarantee conversion but People many times click them just because they look flashy.

 Flaw: Majority of the mobile devices does not support flash banner ads which makes impacts on the overall CTR of any campaign. If these mobile devices are your target group then you should certainly drop the idea of having flash ads.
 

If your chose expandable image ad, then good news is that you won't be charged even if the customer clicks on your ad to expand the image within the ad, as it is the interactive nature of the expandable ad format."

How will you be charged in expandable ad format is given below:

1.     Any click on the standard Text headline of the ad and when customer is taken to your ad's landing page. This is a standard click through is a charged click.

2.     If any of the viewer clicks on the ad to initiate your AdWords for video ad content, then you won't be charged anything. But, you will be charged if the viewer watches the video for a minimum amount of time."

 Moral of the story. If mobile or iOS devices are not your target audience then test both types of ads on your campaigns and evaluate them correctly and see what works for you better, taking example of evaluating it , it should not be measured in number of leads but quality of leads.

Always consider the purpose of the image ads before you start creating one.

Mobile Advertising Campaign Process

Best Suited Ad Size For Mobile Campaign

• 300x250 (medium rectangle)
• 320x50 (mobile leaderboard) or 320x100 are most common.
• The smaller ad will always be vertically aligned at the top.

"Avoid Squeeze Pages as its not allowed in AdWords Campaign"

Squeeze page: It means collecting visitors' personal information without giving them any ethical reason for the same.
Solution:

1. Use a landing page which shows an ethical data as per the collection policy. It should clearly tells users why they need to submit their personal information and what would you do to them. 
2. Add value to your page by adding infomative and relevant contents which will convince them to try out your products/services. 

  Best Practices For PPC Landing Pages

Main theme of landing page should be to deliver relevance rest points are listed below:

1. You should know whom are you targeting and accordingly create a pool of keywords.
2. primary headline of your landing page should have keyword
3. Every word of headline should be in capital letter
4. Add Call-to-Action (CTA) to your ad
5. Make Sure that the CTA and landing page match.
6. Landing page should have single focused theme and purpose.
7. The focus of Landing page should be to achieve your market goal.
8. Keep your landing page Short & Sweet i.e. It should be quickly scan-able with the help of bullet points, or numbered lists and paragraphs should be dense
9. Remove distractions like menu options, Navigation or Links
10. Provide sufficient detail to support the response decision
11. Call the Visitor to Action & Share the Benefits of the Offer
12. Use the right page length  for example if it is a form, Keep the Forms Short
13. Add Compelling & meaningful Images and graphics
14. Testimonials can be great help use it for authenticity.
15. Show your phone number this helps in telling people that you are real and can interact with you on a personal level.
16. Try video. It’s been shown to improve conversion by up to 80%.
17. Add Social Sharing
18. Make it mobile-friendly and Page load speed should be minimal

 After You have created Ad Copies and Landing page Now comes the process of setting up the campaign. Now you can easily set up the campaign with the help of Adwords interface.

For Campaign Optimization you can look at the "Adwords Campaign Optimization Tips And Checklists"

Adwords Campaign Optimization Tips And Checklists

I would recommend everyone to look up to this checklist whenever you wish to improve or optimize your new campaign. These 6 steps will help you can improve and refine the campaign Five steps are as follows:

1) Improve keywords: Make sure that keywords are specific & relevant. One word keywords are usually too broad and you might need longer or secondary keywords to refine it further. Broad match modifier can be a plus many times- use a + sign in front of keyword that you want to be included in the user’s search (i.e.: +Delhi +shoes).Click below to know more.

Improve keywords

2) Refine your bids: Use the ‘Avg. Pos’ metric when you are looking for your ads to appear in search engine’s first page.Click below to know more.

Understanding bidding basics

Choose your bid and budget

3) Review budget: See if your budget can match up your goals if not please revise your budget, so as to make full use of campaign.Click below to know more.

Set a budget for your campaign

4) Ads: ads should be well grouped as per the campaign next you should look at the ads whether they engaging or not if not try creating engaging and to the point so that user doesn’t get misguided..

Capitalize first letter of each word in the title, include keywords in your ads, & include a call-to-action.

Click below to know more

Understanding ad position and Ad Rank

5) Ad Extensions: This feature may help you get more clicks as you may have phone number displayed on ad which user might be looking for or some related page that he might be searching for! Sometime cheesy words may attract user. Click below to know more. 

Ad extensions

6) Targeting: If you are running display, video or YouTube campaign ‘radius targeting’ can be good option if you are looking for specific area targeting. Click below to know more.

Targeting your ads

You can follow these steps with your own pace and speed depending upon the type of campaign you are managing.Apart from these 6 basic steps you need to check few more things that includes:

Whether your ads have been approved or not and are they under the policy of Google. If the ads are not approved you may need to make changes as per the Google guidelines. Are the ads relevant to the campaign?

Are the keywords that you choose right for the campaign, do they have potential to convert the client? What type of campaign would suit the campaign, would it be video, search or display.

Now once the campaign is started just see what amount of impressions are being show and whether they ads are getting clicks or not, if not you need to check the whether ads are appearing or not if they are appearing very low then you will need to improve ad position by increasing bid.

I hope these points help you guys.