4 ROI Boosting Secrets You Cannot Ignore

Getting good quality traffic via AdWords PPC is just part of the work required to get the most out of Pay Per Click Marketing, Once you have the traffic you need to actually convert as many visitors as possible into leads or sales. This is where conversion rate optimisation comes in.

A recent study revealed that for every £92 spent on traffic generation; only £1, yes a measly one pound! was spent on trying to optimise the site to boost ROI, which is a mind boggling split! A few pounds spent on site can make a massive impact on the capital employed in PPC management.

If you are spending money on PPC traffic then you simply must do some ROI boosting conversion optimisation work on your campaign and site. Here are four great secrets, we’d say tips but frankly most people have no clue about them or really making them work properly so we think they qualify to be “secrets” as too many people focus on getting as much traffic as they can rather than getting good traffic and converting as much of that as possible.

1) Use Negative Keywords

What : Negative keywords help you save money by further refining who your adverts display to. Negative keywords can rescue an adgroup, e.g. when bidding on “ppc management” to advertise to potential clients we would ensure that we had negative keywords like these below:

Jobs, vacancies, vacancy, training, tutorial, salary, recruitment.. and so on

Why : ROI is boosted by cutting down on irrelevant advert impressions leading to wasted click costs, Click Through Ratio is boosted leading to an increase in Quality Score, which in turn leads to a decrease in Cost Per Click!

How : To find out how to implement negative keywords you can read the Google help article here

2) Use Call Tracking

What : Call tracking is THE second most importing thing after negative keywords, if you take calls as a result of buying traffic to your site you simply MUST know which keywords are earning you money and which keywords are losing it for you. Most people think that getting call tracking in place is an expensive and troublesome task but it’s become far easier and cheaper to implement.

It’s simple a case of pasting some coding script on your site wherever you wish your telephone number to display, then once a user lands on your site from SEO or PPC activity they are shown a unique telephone number. This number is linked to the keyword search term that they used and once dialed it’s recorded that that keyword triggered a call.

On some call tracking systems you can even add in if the call was a lead, or even the sale value if a sale was made once the user has hung up.

Why : ROI is boosted because call tracking allows you full PPC attribution value to the keyword level, it stops you from deleting keywords that don’t drive online sales, but deliver offline as well as being able to delete the keywords that don’t deliver any ROI with peace of mind without guessing if they are delivering offline leads or sales.

How : You can read more about call tracking here

3) Use Social Proof

What : The old sales phrase “people buy people” is true in a different way now with Social Media; What your friends like and how they interact with those preferences has a direct impact upon how you relate to brands, products and services, so ensure that you add social media markers to your site and product pages, but then ensure you make a concerted effort to get likes and positive interactions too, there’s nothing worse than having only a handful of people liking something, it can have the opposite effect, but when done right it can really boost conversions.

Also use testimonials and reviews as they too can really affect conversions in a positive way. Consider using external review sites like TrustPilot.com the stars you gain will be pulled through into your AdWords adverts, further boosting click through ratio as they display that you are socially approved, even if they don’t know those reviewing, Amazon has really focussed on getting reviews and star ratings on their product listings.

Why : ROI is boosted as conversion is increased due to trust and social proof being established, this group social proof can influence people into the “do as others do, it must be safe” mindset that leads to higher conversion rates.

How : Use social media plugins on site, get testimonials, reviews and likes on products or services, disply these prominently on the landing page near a strong call to action.

4) Use Trust And Security Seals

What : Trust indicators come in a variety of forms but usually it’s orientated around the shopping cart or site security, or business community security.

OrientalFurniture.com increased their conversion by 7.6% by using a BuySafe Inc. trust seal, you can read more about this here

Petco.com increase sales by 8.83% by adding a Hacker Safe seal to their site, you can read more about Petco here

Why : People are more inclined to buy if they feel they are in safe hands so display trust seals, relevant body awards to make.

How : Choose a relevant trust seal, or better yet 2 or more seals that cover data security, eCommerce security and business integrity, you may not sell products on your site but if you collect details then consider displaying a Hacker Safe seal or secure certificate.

If you keep spending money without looking at the landing page you are sending it to then you ARE throwing some money away for sure, you really need to test and monitor different elements of your landing page to really boost the conversion rate, you can effectively cut the cost of your Pay Per Click activity this way.