You got your Google ads campaign running, and you start seeing decent click-through rates. Surprisingly, they are higher than the average CTR for your industry, and you are feeling good about yourself for coming up with such a clever set of ads.
However, you notice that, even when there is a lot more traffic coming to your site, it does not translate into more revenue. In other words, your business is now losing money if you take into account the extra expenses generated by online advertising.
First of all, don’t panic. You´re not alone in this. Actually, it happens more often than you imagine. This is exactly why eCommerce SEO experts and digital marketing agencies exist.
Online marketing consists of a collection of methods and strategies that have evolved over more than 50 years (Many of our strategies stem from the days of telemarketing).
There are so many factors that determine the success or failure of an online marketing campaign that you would need an in-depth PPC audit to find out what you are doing wrong.
However, we can give you some pointers you can follow to increase your chances of success.
Determine your Current Conversion Rates
First, you need to calculate your eCommerce conversion rate. This is the easy part. You only need to divide the number of transactions by the number of total visits over a determined period.
For example, if there were 1000 sessions last month, but only 10 purchases, you will have a conversion rate of 0.01% (10/1000=0.01). This can be a good or a bad conversion rate depending on your niche. For example, an exotic car dealership can call that a good month. On the other hand, if you´re selling regular t-shirts you desperately need to pump those numbers up.
If you are getting a lot of traffic, but your conversion rates are on the low end of your specific industry (more on that later), it is time to find out where that traffic comes from and how they are using your website.
Set Up Google Analytics
Google Analytics is by far the most used traffic tracking tool in the world. The best part of Google Analytics is that it is free. It is a very potent tool that allows you to study your traffic sources, the behavior of your visitors, and where most of them decide to abandon your page before converting.
When running PPC campaigns, you must keep an eye on Google Analytics metrics to see if they are targeting the right audience. For example, a hiking shoe store owner might think it is a good idea to target the keyword “Shoe Store” and set Google ads for broad matches. That would certainly tell Google to show your ads to people who might be just comparing prices or are looking for other kinds of shoes, causing them to click and bounce.
Also, competition for that keyword is savage, meaning that you will have to outbid everyone and still get useless clicks from random people.
The best solution is to determine who your customers are before starting your PPC campaign.
Build Your Buyer Persona
A buyer persona is your ideal target or a description of the clients who are typically looking for your products. For our hiking shoe store, we know we want to target young adults with a certain income range, and have shown interest in topics related to nature, outdoor activities, and fitness. We will prefer to target people who live close to parks and rugged terrain, and have bought hiking equipment in the past.
Both Google Ads and Facebook do a very good job at finding out all this information from their users, allowing you to design ads that specifically cater to them.
You also might want to target a different keyword with less competition such as “hiking shoe store”. Here is a list of more targeted keywords that will narrow down the kind of traffic you will attract.
Your Click-Through-Rates will be a lot lower after you do this, but that’s a good thing. Only people who are already interested in your products will click so your marketing budget will not be squandered away with useless clicks.
Optimize your Online Store
Something that keeps customers from converting is not knowing what to do after they enter a website. You might think your product pages contain everything a customer needs to know about the product to be convinced. However, if it lacks proper calls to action, a logical site structure, or an easy-to-use checkout process, your users will bounce back to the search results and click on the next URL.
PPC can only get your customers so far. If they cannot find what they’re looking for within 10 seconds, you lost that customer forever. Here is another issue Google Analytics can help you with. It not only tracks traffic sources but also tells you what users do once they land on your site. It tells you where your users usually get stuck so you can make the appropriate corrections.
Many things can affect user behavior. Depending on your niche, you might want to lead people directly into a landing page instead of your homepage. Load speed is increasingly more important as it affects user experience. Local searches are uniquely affected by responsiveness; having a responsive website is key to attracting people with high purchase intent. And, of course, an easy and unobtrusive checkout process.
What is considered an ideal eCommerce conversion rate?
Everyone wants to know this magic number. The problem is it depends on the industry.
However, a 2% conversion rate has always been considered a great base goal. It does not mean that having a lower conversion rate is necessarily bad. After all, every business owner will love having higher conversion rates.
A word of caution. Higher conversion rates do not always mean higher profit margins. There are factors like shopping cart average sizes, shipping costs, and product return rates that affect your overall eCommerce revenue. Having the right eCommerce management systems in place will allow you to widen your profit margins so your store can withstand your current conversion rates until you can start the optimization process.
If you want to know more about how an eCommerce agency can help you craft an effective PPC campaign and drastically improve conversion rates, contact Genius eCommerce® today!
