How To Improve Your Conversion Rate

Get the Flash Player to see this Google AdWords tutorial about building your keyword list.

Learn the four essential factors that influence your conversion rate with Google AdWords.

This article aims to help you understand what your conversion rate is and how to improve it.

What Is Conversion Rate and Why It’s Important

When a web surfer notices your ad and clicks on it, you have a potential customer. If this visitor decides to buy something from you, then you have a customer. This can be described as a conversion because the website visitor was “converted” into a customer.

Your conversion rate is the number of conversions divided by the number of pageviews. It is the percent of people that buy something when visiting your website.

The conversion rate can be influenced by:

Ad Quality

Don’t overlook any aspect of your ad: capitalisation, punctuation, how you write your URL, etc. With AdWords you’ll have to discover a more technical side of your own creativity, testing what works best can be the key to your success.

AdWords is the cheapest and most trustworthy way to test your ads. By always assigning two ads to each keyword, you can make the ads compete for the same keyword. The default settings in AdWords ensures that the higher performing ad gets shown more often. After a few weeks you should notice a difference between your ads and you should edit or delete the lower performing ad, so you can test another version.

Finding out which ads work and which ones don’t will help you learn how to write killer ads. Learn from the higher performing ads.

A note of caution: ads are better when they bring in more traffic that converts. The volume alone doesn’t count.

Efficiency of Your Keywords

Keywords contribute to the distribution of your ads. When you place your ad in the wrong place (by using the wrong keyword) you lead users towards your site that aren’t really interested in what you’re doing. They are not your target clients. Your landing page, no matter how good and professional, will never convert them. But you still pay for their clicks.

In this case, having more visitors does hurt. Keep the keywords that bring you targeted traffic.

The Quality of Your Landing Page

The landing page is the final step in your conversion efforts and too many people act as if it should be the least important too. In fact, the landing page is essential. You can’t start an AdWords campaign before having a landing page. You should not have an AdWords campaign up and running before making sure that your landing page has all the ingredients to ensure your success: a clear message, a goal, good copy that leads to conversions, and high usability.

Some people tend to become preoccupied with the “look” of their landing page – forgetting that their page is there to perform a duty, a purpose. When an internet users finds the answer to a problem, they don’t care where they found it or how the place looks, all that they care about is how they can use that answer and if the solution is trustworthy.

Don’t forget that people that find their answer on your web page can become leaders for more targeted traffic, not to mention they could become return visitors.

The Overall Quality of Your Campaign Management

An AdWords campaign becomes better or worse overtime, depending on the way you manage it.

Never stop testing various solutions, improving keywords and landing pages.

Tracking Your Conversion Rate

Tracking conversions is probably the only process that you can automate. You can read more on this topic in our article “How To Track Your Results“.

Improve Your Conversion Rate

The most important thing to realise is that more traffic doesn’t necessarily mean more customers.

AdWords is the perfect vehicle in which you can advertise to your exact target market, be sure to use all the settings available to precisely focus on the right users. For example, make sure to choose the right languages and locations you want to target and try not to use broad keywords.

Three steps towards improving your conversion rate:

By writing better ads.
Through better landing pages.
By eliminating unproductive traffic.

Remember, you can watch this and other AdWords Tutorials on our Youtube channel too.
Further Reading: We recommend reading How to Improve Your ROI (Return On Investment) next, or select from our list of AdWords tutorials below.