Five ways to boost your conversion rate without wasting ad budget

Improve the conversion rate of your ads and maximize profits without draining your entire budget.

Most businesses are constantly searching for cheap or even free ways to upgrade their advertisement schemes in a way that will help to draw in new customers, keep current customers coming back, and encourage more profitable conversions.

Here are just five of the tricks and tactics that you can use to improve your conversion rate without spending too much of your ad budget.

1. Increase your bids on best sellers

If there are a number of products that you know to be successful on your website or convert particularly well when placed in advertisements, you should increase your bids for those options.

To get started, you’ll need to use Google Analytics or another similar program to determine which products are converting best. Then create an ad group that specifically caters to those top performing examples. You can even use label columns on platforms like Google AdWords to name each group.

Using a group of ads for your best seller products that allow for higher bids should help increase exposure for products that already have a track record for selling. In other words, you’ll get more eyes on effective products, which means more sales for you.

To take ad groups even further, you can always alter the bidding amounts and the display frequencies for different days and times in the week.

2. Align landing pages with ad copy

Upgrading your copy and making sure that all of your ads correspond with the correct landing pages should be something that you do from day one. For example, if someone is searching for a pair of black boots, but you send them to a category that contains every single pair of shoes you sell, you could end up losing (Read more...) on customers. Most consumers are too busy to search through your entire site, and they want to find exactly what they need with ease via the navigation offered on your site.

Don’t leave selling your products through ads to chance. You should never assume that your shoppers are in a buying mind frame. Instead, you’ll need to guide them through every stage of the sales funnel – from clicking on your ads, to moving to a relevant landing page, the shopping cart, and so on.

3. Don’t bid by margin

Grouping your products according to how much you make for each sale can seem like a good idea. This allows you to bid higher on products that give you the best profits. However, if the product doesn’t sell through your chosen platform, the margin is useless. Your ad groups should be set to ensure that similar products are grouped together, which will allow you to understand which groups perform best and change your bids accordingly.

Bidding according to your margin can hurt your conversions by prompting you to make inaccurate assumptions about the performance of certain products. Instead of simply guessing at what’s giving you the best success in your business, let the data speak for itself and optimize your advertising schemes from there.

4. Reverse engineer the purchasing journey

A majority of consumers start their purchase journey at the stage of brand awareness. Then they gradually decide what they want to purchase and who they want to purchase from.

Google Analytics has a great tool in their reports that you can use to learn more about customer behavior, conversion flow, and acquisition. If you pick up enough data over time, you’ll be able to use these reports to find out where most of your customers come from and the standard path of purchase they’re taking.

The more you know about how your customers end up converting, the more you will be able to adjust your marketing strategy to support their experience. Such insight also ensures that customers are prompted to make purchases from their initial introduction to a product until the final moment of the checkout page.

5. Suppress products that perform poorly

Finally, remember that you can use negative keywords in your ads to limit the terms your products will show up for when customers enter phrases into search. It’s also important to have a group in your product listing ad that has been carefully designed to limit visitor exposure to products that have a high cost of sale or poor conversion rate.

Keep in mind that the ad group you develop for products you want to suppress should typically be lower in bids than your other ad groups, so you don’t end up wasting money on products that don’t sell. Products that don’t sell eat into your ad budget and use up funds that you could otherwise utilize to promote products that are more successful.