Google Ads not Converting? Try These 4 Optimization Tricks
Adwords is not converting and you feel like you may be wasting your money. Try these four conversion optimization tricks that are guaranteed to increase your Google ads conversion rates.
If Google Ads (previously “Adwords”) is not converting, you may feel like you are wasting your money. And you are right. One must invest in ad campaigns that convert. Your ad spend paired with a higher conversion rate means more sales, more leads or more subscriptions.
Whether your campaign’s cost-per-lead is too high, or your quality scores are stuck toward the bottom, these four conversion optimization tricks may bring your campaigns back to life. Give them a try.
Google Ads Optimization Trick #1: Take control of your landing page experience and ROI
You put a lot of effort crafting the perfect Google ad. People are clicking through to learn more about your offer. And unfortunately, your conversion rate is stinkingly low.
To avoid this, you must take control of your landing page experience and your ROI. Otherwise, your cost per conversion will skyrocket. And you want more leads, signups and sales, right? Let’s take a look at a few simple and easy ways to see if this could be your problem or barrier to conversion.
Improving your landing page conversion rate will lower your customer acquisition costs.
Make sure your landing page content is in alignment with your offer
This is one of the most common mistakes businesses make when it comes to Google Ad campaigns. You may be missing out on sales if your ad copy advertises a specific item on your ecommerce website, and then send clicks to a category page where the featured item is hard to find.
The visitor or prospective customer has to make an effort to find what they clicked on. Make it EASY for them to get what they came for. Your offer.
Check out these 20 Landing Page Best Practices to Kickstart Your Conversion Lift, where we explain how to do this in more detail.
The content of your ad tells you what a visitor expects to find after clicking. Give the user what they want right away. You can tell if your landing page isn’t satisfactory to your visitors by looking at click-map and scroll map reports. These conversion tracking reports are available from a number of vendors such as CrazyEgg and Hotjar. The example below belongs to one of our clients, the Turtle Bay Golf Resort in Oahu, Hawaii.
If visitors aren’t scrolling down your landing page, it may not be a good match for your ad.
Why wouldn’t visitors to a golf resort landing page be interested in golf? Maybe their influential spouses don’t play.
Adwords Conversion Trick #2: Improve Click-to-Call Conversions for Mobile Google Ads
Google research states that 70% of mobile searchers use the click to call feature. Moreover, 47% of those searching on mobile say that if a business doesn’t have a phone number associated with their search results, they’re more likely to explore other brands.
There is no need for landing pages when you use Adwords Call extensions. Users see your ad, and click to call immediately. To find success with click-to-call conversions, you’re going to need stellar messaging stuffed into thirty characters or less on your headlines. Try some of these ideas to boost your click-to-call rate:
AB Test Copy to Increase Your Conversion Rate
Troubleshoot the whole conversion funnel:
- Set up call reporting and you’ll be able to see call durations, start and end time, area code, and whether the call was connected.
- It’s important to know which ads are delivering those calls. Make sure you’re tracking calls on your back end to know what’s working and what’s being wasted.
Listen to this PodCast: Why Marketing Leads Don’t Turn into Sales and What to do About It
Google Ads CRO Trick #3: Create More Landing Pages to Match Ad Offers
This advice goes hand in hand with our first recommendation. We cannot emphasize this enough. If you happen to have different offers, creating different landing pages that cater to that searchers’ intent is a must.
You may argue that you have a single offer. And that it’s simple enough a single landing page will do.
When a landing page matches the offer in an ad, we call this “keeping the promise” made in the ad. If your ad promotes the quality of your products, your landing page should be focused on quality. If your ad features a discount, your landing page should talk about discounts and savings.
Here’s an example of a client’s landing page that was changed to focus on a discount-oriented ad with great success.
A one-size-fits-all landing page approach may be driving your cost-per-acquisition through the roof.
Get Google Ads Converting Trick #4: End High Click-rate but Low Conversion-rate Ads. Look beyond the Click.
What’s your most important key performance indicator? Clicks? Conversions? ROAS? ROI?
Look beyond the click. If an ad isn’t converting but it’s getting lots of clicks, the ad may be misleading. Your landing page call to action may be too much of an ask.
Review your conversion strategy. Question every step.
Are you trying to move them down your conversion funnel too soon and too fast? Are you giving them enough reassurances? Information?
Or maybe you are targeting the wrong audience.
Make sure to check out your “Search Terms” report, too. If your ads are triggered by irrelevant search terms, you never had a chance to begin with.
Create ads and ad groups with highly targeted keywords, a solid list of negative keywords to match your relevant search queries.
In this client’s example, an intimidating form was replaced with a step-by-step quiz style form. The results were tremendous: a whooping 61% increase in conversion rate.
Google ads not converting? You can help a visitor get through a form one step at a time.
One Final Recommendation when Adwords is not Converting: Use ad extensions
Even though you don’t get to force Google to show ad extension information, leveraging this Adwords feature is a smart way to boost conversions. If shown, they can help you weed out bad prospects, incentivize relevant searchers to click and even guide them to take the best action or land on a higher converting landing page.
Read more about which ad extensions you should be using to improve your customer acquisition efforts
Need help boosting conversions from your advertising efforts?
It takes a team to optimize your ads. You can have a team of experts do the job for you for less than the cost even one employee… if you can find them.
Our clients have seen increases of up to a 40% in leads and appointments from their paid search and social ads campaigns after we optimized their conversion rate.
or Call us to discuss how we can help increase your advertising ROI.
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Like the example you had with the “Free Breakfast…” this goes to show people don’t do nearly enough with free premiums as they do very well with PPC. Whether that be free boxes for a moving company or whatever which is just one other example I had that did well before.
Absolutely! Take action while spending as little as you can. Thank you very much for your insights!