As an aspiring entrepreneur, you would have explored all possible multiverse in search of new customers. In a world dominated by digital technologies, it’s normal that the adventure enticed you to explore the digital realm and target digital nomads.
Great! Now that you are familiar with the digital world and the fundamentals involved in it, let’s conjure all our senses and ask a basic question. How to optimize your search ads for higher conversion?
For a majority of millennials, Google tends to be the go-to destination for all their queries. In a sense, the platform has become so powerful that it succeeded in gaining the trust of a wide audience. Moreover for businesses, establishing a presence on this platform seems to be one determining factor in terms of market capitalization.
Google as a marketing platform enables a business to make itself available to a wide range of customers. Time and time again reach entices business to go overboard and invest a huge amount on this channel. For most, it starts from day one. Although search ads can bring a ton of clicks to a website, your business may not reap the fruit if your outlined search campaign strategy is lackluster. Likewise, when everyone follows the same top 10 strategies it creates repetition and makes the ad copy boring.
Even so, isolated clicks will never guarantee success. Contrary, conversions will have a direct impact on the bottom-line.
Table of Contents
Create Ads that have a direct impact on your conversion rate
Most digital gurus succeed because they set aside a meticulous plan. The campaign managers invest their time to perfect the ads they create. Every ad copy is subjected to extreme scrutiny, tested and iterated to persuade the targeted customer to take an intended action. The ad copy should be creative enough to stand out in SERP and inspire the user to click through. Additionally, when the ads are as creative as possible, it entices the user to cross the psychological threshold and take the desired action.
Craft for customers – Businesses should gather necessary customer insights and perceptions in order to deliver the right experience to customers. Creating such customer-oriented strategies will most likely increase the probability of conversion.
Discover your customer needs and wants
To deliver the best to your customers you need to make sure that you have an in-depth understanding of the business that you are handling. In fact, understanding the key pain points of your customers will help draft ad copies that tend to talk directly to them. Put together an ad that directly addresses the wants and needs of your customer.
The secret of perfecting an ad is knowing the end goal. What the customer intends to achieve while interacting with the business.
Eg:- Let’s consider a business that is into organic dairy products. Say, person “X” landed on your website using the search term “Certified Organic Milk”. The search term clearly shows that the user is looking for genuine brands that are certified by the governing/ regulatory authorities. The customer doesn’t want to take chances. So when creating an RLSA campaign to retarget these customers it’s better to spice the ad copy with details of certification, awards, recognitions, review extensions, etc.
Crafting such ad copies that clearly addresses the concern of the end customer can dramatically increase click-through rates.
Mirror your customers end goals
Think about a strategy where you can reflect the intent of people directly on SERP. Exactly, The end-user sees what they are searching for.
Awesome, Isn’t it?
Campaign managers should set aside a strategy to connect with the expectation of the end-user. Create campaigns that resonate with the customer’s end objective.
Consider the user uses a search term “Black Forest Pastry” to find local pastry shops nearby. By using a dynamic keyword insertion strategy you will be able to display the exact search term in the title of your ad. Now I bet you see the contextual reference of the ad. The customer sees an ad with exactly the same product he/ she was searching for. Using this strategy you are able to mirror the user’s end goal directly on the SERP. This strategy enables marketers to increase click-through rates.
Craft Your Ad Copy Such that a User Could Not Resist Engaging.
You only got limited space to convey the message and convince your customers.
Seriously?
On the desktop, you compete with 8 – 10 people for this retail space and on mobile, the number even shows a downward trend. The competition is so fierce only the best campaigns are featured on top of the page. Likewise, while getting featured on top of the page seems an inundating task, the real challenge is to stand out and increase the click-through rate at the least possible investment.
Jot down multiple version of your Ads
Ads that Directly Highlight Benefits
When creating an ad, a campaign manager needs to decide what benefit needs to be highlighted. The ad copy will be designed to emphasize the value an end-user will derive from interacting with the business.
Ads that Talk About the USP
Jot down an ad copy featuring the USP of your business. Say, you are into pre-owned luxury business with your USP “Luxury at an Affordable Price”. In such cases, a majority of your customers are looking for refurbished luxury products at an affordable price. To make the ad more relevant to the audience it’s better to highlight the USP in the ad.
Feature-Based Ads
When creating a feature-based search ad you need to decide which feature to be highlighted. Let’s say you are selling anti-pollution air masks. Your market research would have clearly indicated that air masks with N-99 filters are of high demand. Now that you know what feature attracts the customer, you can prioritize that particular feature to gain the attention of customers.
Ads with Emotional Triggers
As humans, we are chained to emotions. Our response to emotions is way stronger. Businesses around the world use emotional branding to connect with their target customers. Investing time to draft an ad copy that elicits an emotion can positively influence the outcome of paid search campaigns.
Campaigns can be created around a handful of emotional triggers. You can find a couple of emotional triggers below.
- Fear: Fear is a strong emotion. Though it reverberates as a negative emotion, when used in the right context it can harness the power to skyrocket your conversion rate. A typical example will be how campaigns with sad stories instill fear among us. At the same time, a campaign manager needs to be sagacious about crafting the right message in order to make sure that the audience doesn’t feel offended.
- Trust: Trust is a powerful emotion that helps brands in creating loyal customers. That’s one reason why businesses make promises that they can fulfill. Any inconsistency with the promise can create confusion and will impact the brand value. Craft messages in such a way that the campaign assures a certain degree of trust, and make sure that supporting tangible facts are listed on the landing page as proof. Win your customer’s trust and the conversion gets easier.
- Value: Think about an ad featuring an exciting offer. A deal that you long waited is right there on SERP. In an instant, without second thoughts you would have clicked on the ad. Exactly! An irresistible offer may seem like an intense money saver. Enabling extensions highlighting promo codes can increase the click-through rates for PPC ads.
- Affirmation
- Inspiration: Certain words like achieve, successful, immediate, extraordinary, win, free, etc. have the power to get users’ attention and motivate them to take action. Search ads that mention free trial tend to get a higher click-through rate. Mentioning free trial will inspire a customer to engage with the ad and feels less reluctant in sharing their personal information. Here the user gets a feeling of gaining something (a trial pack) in return for sharing the information.
Use Google Ads Extension to Tell a Story.
Extensions are crazy, use them to tell your story.
Most marketers make the mistake of not adding enough extensions to the ads. Based on Google, adding an extension will increase your CTR by 10-15%.
Good News. Isn’t it?
Also, the extensions give you an opportunity to provide additional information about the business. More the information you have, the higher the relevance of your ad. As the relevance of your ad goes up along with CTR, it can profoundly decrease the cost per click.
Sitelink Extension
Sitelink extension feature enables you to feature more or less 4 links on SERP. These functions act as site navigations and give the user an opportunity to visit multiple pages straight from SERP.
Callout Extension
Callout extension can be used to mention certain benefit-oriented key phrases on SERP.
Eg: 100% Free of Preservatives – Healthy & Farm Fresh – Organic Certified – Everyday Morning 6 am – Free Delivery.
The callout extensions mentioned above tells a clear story about the business.
Affiliate Location Extension
Affiliate location extension helps in connecting your customers with nearby retail stores that sell your product. When customers search for a product on Google it shows the nearest store that sells the product on the map or an address. With the affiliate extension option, the end customer gets an additional option to avail your products from nearby stores rather cover a distance and purchase it from your owned business location.
Message Extension
The message extension gives your customers an additional option to reach out to your business via text messages. Without navigating to the website, customers can interact with a business and get clarity on subjects that cease them from purchasing the solution. Through message extension mobile potential customers can directly reach out to your business and seek information (eg: book appointment, fix a meeting, get a quote, etc).
Lead Form Extension
A lead form on SERP.
Hurrah. That’s one crispy extension.
Filling a form on mobile is comparatively harder when compared to its desktop version. Albeit the sharp increase of internet users on mobile, the cold through is that the conversion rate is less on mobile when compared to its rival. Since leads and sales are two crucial metrics a business uses to determine the effectiveness of their campaigns. Google is forced to come up with an extension that directly influences these metrics. Lead form extension is such a finely crafted extension that allows users to convert without navigating from SERP.
Keep a Close Eye on your Analytics and your Competitors Strategy
Now you may think all is set and your campaign will start to outrank every other business on SERP.
Alas! The journey starts and leads will start to get stacked.
In reality – Soon disappointment creeps in.
Felt like the budget gets depleted in a wink. Even worse, the cost per lead just gave you a jolt. Like a bolt out of the blue, your campaign strategy turned out to be a nightmare.
There could be multiple reasons why your campaign failed to get the returns you targeted.
Research around your competitors Search Ads
If you can perfect your ad by understanding why your competitor outranks you, then why not use it to get some competitive advantage. Power your search ads with the intel you get from your competitors.
Whereas, the simplest and easiest way to do this is by triggering a search on Google with a relevant search term. This will populate a couple of campaigns that are ranking for that particular keyword. Explore, investigate, compare, and understand why these campaigns are better. You can also make use of certain premium tools like SEMRush, Similar Web, Spy Fu, etc to analyze your competitor paid strategies.
Data from Google Ads and Google Analytics
Use your data to get a competitive advantage. With digital transformation, businesses around the globe can make use of data to arrive at strategic decisions. Besides, explore your Google Ads to figure out what campaigns are giving you better return on ad spend, and why a handful of campaigns created around your focus keywords are not driving results.
Moreover, you start off with a simple strategy. Look for the Ad relevance, landing page experience, and quality score of your ads. Make sure almost all these metrics are optimized to give the best results possible.
Reverse Engineer the buyer’s journey
Let’s consider that a particular landing page is giving a high conversion rate. Rather than taking a couple of backsteps and assuming that the landing page is well optimized for the target customers. Why not invest some time and trace back to the traffic source. This reverse-engineering activity will help you in exploring opportunities that never crossed your mind. Investigating further, you will be amazed to find the different combinations of search terms that bring in leads. Once you have these search terms, it gets easier for you to craft high converting search ads rooting around these search terms.
Parting Note:
In conclusion, search ads are an easy way to drive instant traffic to your business.
Now it’s your turn. Craft a couple of search campaigns using the above strategies and let me know what worked well for you.
