After reviewing last years results, do you find yourself at a crossroads with your Adwords campaigns? Wondering if you should increase your Google AdWords budget to improve your overall conversion results?
Hopefully, as marketers, we all use a conversion tracking system like Google Analytics. Or a similar one that is based on AdWords to improve and optimize our ads campaign performance.
We spend hours studying data which is supposed to help us make the best decision possible. We discuss and debate keywords which are considered to perform poorly or wonderfully with clients, friends, and colleagues.
And ultimately, our decisions and conversations are based on the conversion data which is reported in Google AdWords and several metric sites or tools we use.
Eventually, we reach a dilemma: do we increase our Google Adwords Budget or not. We want to boost conversions even more since conversions are why we run the campaigns in the first place.
The truth is, although it might help in some specific situations, increasing your budget doesn’t necessarily increase conversions.
Before you consider an increase in your budget, here are a few methods to improve your AdWords conversions that should be tried first.
Tips To improve conversions without increasing Google Adwords Budget
1 – Allocate a Percentage of your Current Budget to Remarketing
Retargeting is believed to be the most potent form of the several ad serving strategies. Properly inserting a tracking code/snippet will help you, re-reach potential customers. Those who’ve visited your site or shown intentions of buying your products, but for whatever reason, have not yet.
Remarketing is a very effective method used in boosting your conversion and convincing undecided visitors to return to your site. This is part of completing the goal and can be achieved using a good conversion tracking tool.
Some PPC advertisers have never thought of using remarketing strategies in their bid to improve their conversion rate. It saves you not only time but money too. Besides, there are rarely any conversion actions when a visitor first visits your website. In fact, according to a report by Baymard, “70% of the buyers will stop or abandon their purchases or shopping cart.”
If you use remarketing, you simply display the very ads that people have seen or earlier viewed. By so doing, you bring them back to your landing page or site, and this increases your chances of having them click on either the display ads on your site or increases their chances of buying your product.
Your conversion rates are usually much higher if retargeting is consistent and properly done. The advice by WordStream is for you to be aggressive because the people you have selected or are targeting have already shown interest in your advert or have visited your site in the past.
Most of the conversion tracking tools use the conversion codes embedded in your site to track how the visitors arrived at the site. You can also add a conversion ID, For example, specify a discount code to see which ads generated conversion actions.
Retargeting lost visitors is used through many platforms, not only Google AdWords, but Facebook ads too.
- Related: The Benefits of using Google Analytics for Remarketing
- Related: Creating Remarketing Lists in Google Analytics
- Related: Why Analytics Data Sharing in AdWords Helps With Effective Decision Making
2 – Research and Use Industry Keywords
Each business industry has lots of keywords and phrases particular to it. Depending on the market, there may be different levels of competition, which determines if the price of advertising will be cheap or expensive. For example, there is strong competition for keywords like insurance, law, and the rehabilitation industry, and they have to pay a higher amount to invest in adverts on topics in such industry
Exhaust keyword potentials, by thoroughly searching for words and phrases that are key to either your product or your service. You can use the Google Keyword Planner (or whichever you are comfortable with) to determine the number of searches that each keyword attracts on the web.
From there, you’d be able to contrast and compare the search trends for those words or phrases over a specific period and as well as the cost estimates. You’re looking for hidden treasure here. Key phrases you may not have considered.
Naturally, you should find high traffic keywords with low competition conditions which satisfies your business intent.
In general, words that have a sense of urgency, and maybe familiarity have more possibilities for conversion than words that do not. For example, the term “Night time café in Ohio” will bring in more conversion as a matter of urgency, although it is less sought after in terms of “Café in Ohio”.
3 – Add and Keep Adding Negative Keywords
For example, when you use ‘free’ as a negative keyword, your ads won’t show up when people search for products and services with ‘free’ attached to them. This is helpful when you’re trying to limit your ad so that it doesn’t show up for people who are just browsing around and aren’t ready to purchase anything yet.”
As Google AdWords is continued to be monitored and studied, we now realize the critical importance of narrowing our targeting for consistency and increase in conversion rates.
If you have the budget to launch a brand awareness campaign, then it is great to remove narrow targeting. However, if you’re on a limited budget and want an accurate estimation that at least 12% (or whatever number you’re shooting for) of users who click on your ad complete a contact form or places an order, then you must be specific.
What this means is that every day or at the very least once a week, you should check what people were looking for when they clicked on your ad. Then you can decide, if you want to pay that extra dollar (or whatever your CPC is) to get more people to click on your ad when searching for that term. Or maybe you need to add a negative word, to reduce the number of loosely targeted traffic being generated from the keyword.
The strategies above, if applied effectively, will give you more positive results which an increase in your budget might not give you. To improve your conversion, you do not necessarily have to increase your Google Adwords budget. First, study the progress of your campaign, and then identify the areas that can be improved upon.
- Related: 11 Google AdWords Tools You Must Know
- Related: Top 5 SEO Tools for Small to Midsize Businesses
Still not sure where to start when it comes to Google AdWords? Contact a member of our team, to discuss your marketing and measurement challenges, needs, and goals.
