Each potential customer has the same question when we do our initial website analysis…”Should I do Pay Per Click With Google?” Although that question is rather straight forward, and Adwords allows you to target the exact clients looking to buy your product or service, the answer is different for clients based upon several factors. Here is the most important question you will need to answer before you dedicate a significant budget towards Paid search on Google….
Does Your Website Convert?
Understanding how well your website converts helps answer questions about utilizing the Adwords platform. We refer to this strategy as Conversion Optimization. If you have a website that converts like crazy, but is lacking traffic, then often times, you can easily justify your decision by your ROI. But most customers don’t have a clue if their site converts or not, and can spend months doing search engine optimization only to find out the website is a dud. We often recommend that clients start out doing some paid advertising while we optimize the website in the background. You can measure your conversion rate, turn traffic on and off, and get a better understanding what changes need to be made to your site in order to improve the conversion rate.
An Example Of Utilizing PPC To Measure Success
We work with a client, EZ Vote Online, and we manage their organic search and optimization. For months, we were ranked in the top 5 for keywords and phrases that we believed would create the highest return on investment. For months, we saw significant amounts of traffic coming to the website, but simply were not converting. We needed to make adjustments on the fly, but couldn’t identify why our conversion rates were so low.
We made two initial changes to our campaign to better understand the interaction with potential clients, and altered our keywords that we targeted using paid search on Google. We thought we had everything covered, but Adwords helped us identify keywords we were not seeing. Yes, this does happen. Just because we search one way, does not mean that everyone searches the same way. Sometimes we need some help.
By utilizing some paid search, we were able to put in some generic keywords to pick up new clicks to our site. The strategy we used was to go after very broad keywords, and break down the longer tail keywords that were being searched for inside the Google Analytics dashboard. We could see that people were clicking on the broad keyword, online elections, but what we didn’t see at first were that people were searching for different combinations of those keywords. We found:
online elections for schools, HOA online elections, online election software, online elections free, best online elections, how to hold an online election for Alumni, and on and on. For a few dollars, we were able to identify strong keywords with buyer intent that would convert into new clients.
You Have To View Website Interaction
The second thing we implemented was a program called Crazy Egg. Crazy Egg allowed us to see how people were interacting with the website, and which buttons were getting the most clicks. We could see one area of the page that continued to get clicked over and over again, but the landing page was not optimized for conversions. After a few weeks of sending paid traffic from Google, we were able to make on-page changes and increase our conversion rates. Once you are able to understand how people interact inside of your site, you can begin to test and make changes to improve your conversion rate.
If your average sale per client is $100, and you have a conversion rate of 1%, you know that for every 100 clients you make $100. But if you are able to increase your conversion rate to 5%, those same 100 visitors now make you $500. Once your conversion rates increase, it is much easier to justify spending money on PPC, as long as you are showing a positive ROI.
To summarize, not everyone is an ideal candidate for PPC, however, most companies will see a huge benefit, even if it is to uncover new keywords, understand conversion rate, or to see visitor experience on your site. If you want to know if PPC is right for you or your company, don’t hesitate to contact Hit Me SEO for a free analysis of your site and your industry.
