The link sends you to a product page on an ecommerce website. You see the same binoculars but no mention of birds. It seems like a great device, but you wonder what makes them suited for bird watching.

Since you only visited the site to learn about the binoculars’ bird-watching advantages, you leave the page in frustration.

This misalignment between the marketing campaign and the destination page happens all the time. Shoppers often fail to find what they expect because a traditional product detail page is simply too general.

For these cases, we need landing pages. They’re similar to product detail pages, but they have a different purpose. They certainly don’t replace the product page. Both of these pages work together to create a high-converting digital experience.

Landing Page vs. Product Page

Landing pages and product detail pages are both important parts of your digital experience. This is true whether you run an ecommerce store, media platform, SaaS, or any digital product where you want visitors to take some kind of action.

However, these tools each serve different purposes, so they shouldn’t be used interchangeably. Knowing when to use each in the customer journey will make all the difference.

What is a Product Detail Page?

A product detail page (PDP) is the page of an ecommerce website where individual products are showcased in detail. The content of this page is designed to educate the customer on this specific product and provide all the information they need to make a purchase decision.

A well-optimized PDP is an important part of the marketing funnel. It builds trust, eliminates friction, and makes shoppers more comfortable about buying. It also improves the shopping experience and encourages repeat visits.

In our experience, the best PDPs include the following key elements:

• Clear and concise name of the product.
• A description of the product, highlighting its key features, benefits, and unique selling points.
• High-quality images from multiple angles.
• Videos demonstrating the product’s use or its features.
• The price of the product, including any discounts or special offers.
• Ratings and reviews from other customers.
• Technical specifications such as size, weight, color options, and materials.
• Information on product variants (e.g., different colors or sizes).
• Real-time stock status.
• Prominent buttons like “Add to Cart,” “Buy Now,” or “Add to Wishlist” to encourage conversions.
• Suggestions for similar or complementary products.

What is a Landing Page?

A landing page is a page designed to complement a marketing campaign. It’s where visitors land after interacting with off-site marketing techniques like ads, affiliate links, and social media posts.

A landing page is focused on driving customers further down the funnel and may not be geared toward one product. They provide education and information in the context of the marketing campaign.

For instance, if the campaign is directed at dog lovers, the landing page should speak directly to dog lovers, even if the product is applicable to different kinds of pets.

Oura Rings is a great example of a product landing page. It’s informational and targeted toward tech enthusiasts who also care about style. (They have traditional product detail pages as well.)

What is the Difference Between a Landing Page and a Product Detail Page?

The major difference between a product detail page (PDP) and a landing page is context.

Visitors usually arrive on a product detail page from a category page. There’s a heavy shopping mindset at play here. Visitors are specifically looking for products and comparing options. It doesn’t align with a specific campaign, so it doesn’t target a specific audience segment or problem.

A landing page, however, is “landed on” from an external site (or email). Since visitors will view the content through the lens of the marketing campaign that brought them to the page (usually reading from top to bottom), it should match the campaign in terms of target audience, tone, and offer.

This means you can customize the content of a landing page based on visitors’ reasons for arriving. You can lean in on whatever angle you used to get people to the page in the first place.

Landing Page vs. Product Page Comparison Chart

Do Landing Pages Convert Better Than Product Pages?

The trend we have seen across our clients is that sending traffic to a landing page is better for the user journey and, therefore, a strong tactic to increase conversions.

This is due to the alignment between the landing page and the marketing campaign. If a paid ad claims the product helps busy parents save time, and the landing page says the same, the visitor is reassured that the product meets the ad’s promise.

Conversely, product detail pages have lower conversions because there’s little connection between a paid ad and the page’s content. The visitor is left to figure it out for themselves.

“It’s all around context for the visitor,” says Jon McDonald, founder of The Good. “The visitor is not going to know everything about your product or your brand as well as you do. Sending them to the product detail page is making too many assumptions. [You’re assuming] that the consumer will figure everything out for themselves, and that’s just not true. So sending them to a dedicated landing page will increase your conversion rates.”

Can I Use a Product Page as a Landing Page?

Yes, but we wouldn’t recommend it. It’s best to have unique, dedicated landing pages for specific marketing efforts. This lets you align the landing page with the campaign’s goals and the customer’s journey.

Should I Drive Traffic to a PDP or a Landing Page?

Typically, you should drive traffic to a landing page. This lets you align the page with the audience who sees the off-site message. This connection improves the odds that the visitor will be educated and properly primed by the landing page content and purchase the product.

Even so, there are exceptions to every rule. You may choose to send traffic to a product-specific landing page or a product page based on what a shopper is searching for.

For instance, suppose a shopper searches for a “podcasting microphone.” In this case, the shopper needs education because they don’t know what they want to buy yet, so you should link them to a landing page that’s optimized for “podcasting microphones.”

But if the shopper searches for “Shure SM7dB Dynamic Microphone,” it’s a safe bet that they’re past the need for information and are ready to buy. You can send them right to the product page.

The same is true if someone searches for a model number. That person knows what they need, so it’s best to get out of their way by putting as few barriers between them and the sale as possible.

As you can see, it is all about creating a seamless customer journey and moving shoppers through your funnel. In most cases, that means sending paid traffic to a landing page.

How to Create and Optimize Landing Pages

Now that we’ve covered the benefits of driving paid traffic to landing pages let’s walk through some best practices to help you craft landing page designs that create a great user experience and push your visitors down the sales funnel. We’ll also show off some landing page examples.

Define Your Goals and Target Audience

Before you start building a landing page, it’s important to understand exactly who you’re creating the page for and what you want to achieve.

Keep in mind that a dedicated landing page doesn’t just sell products. It can capture leads through an ebook, webinar, or demo sign-up or thank visitors after they make a purchase or subscribe to your email list. Define what your page should accomplish before you build anything.

Note: For the sake of this article, we use a lot of product-focused landing page examples, but your goals may vary.

Then, consider your audience. This target audience might include your entire customer base or just a segment of it. This should be the same audience you use in the aligned off-site marketing campaign.

Refer to your internal data to familiarize yourself with the page’s audience. Make sure you understand the types of words and images that are most effective for those people.

Create a Benefit-Focused Headline

Without a doubt, a compelling headline is the most important element on your landing page. This bit of copy should focus on benefits, not features. You aren’t necessarily describing the product; you’re explaining how the visitor’s life will be better with it.

Again, refer to your repository of knowledge about your customer to find the perfect words to suit their unique situation for your landing page headline.

Creatorpreneur is an effective product landing page example here. Notice how it uses specific words in the headline and subheading that appeal to its audience, like “creative,” “scale up,” and “sustainable growth.”

Match Images and Copy to Your Audience

Unlike a product detail page, where you show stark images of your product, your landing page offers the freedom and space to get more creative.

This is the place to use images and video to form a human connection. Use big lifestyle photos, explainer videos, and full-width hero images. A relevant video can increase your conversions by 86%.

Most importantly, match your media to your copy. If your headline and supporting text refer to athletes, your pictures and videos should include them as well.

It’s no surprise that Apple’s MacBook Air landing page is top-notch. It’s full of large, powerful images and clear language that appeals to tech-loving creatives. An image doesn’t do this page justice, so make sure to visit to explore the interactive elements.

Keep the Important Information Above the Fold

Visitors are more likely to stay with your page if they see the most important information right away without having to scroll. We refer to this section using an old newspaper phrase: “above the fold.”

What goes above the fold? Your headline, value proposition, clear call-to-action (which could be a button or form), and usually some kind of media that helps the visitors connect with the content.

Peloton smartly keeps all of the important information right at the top. The call-to-action sends you to a product detail page (that’s also worth checking out).

Let Them Buy If They Want

The call-to-action on a landing page typically links to a product detail page, but some visitors may decide to buy while they are still on the landing page. For these people, it’s smart to give them a shortcut by offering an “add to cart” button somewhere on the page.

Generally, it’s best to keep this option out of the way, perhaps in a sticky bar at the top or bottom or a slide-out sidebar. Notice how the landing page for Cowboy e-bikes has a sticky section at the bottom so visitors always have a path toward conversion.

Of course, this is only relevant if the page’s goal is to sell something. If you have some other goal, a link to purchase might be a distraction.

Include Social Proof

People prefer to buy from brands they trust, which is why social proof is such an important part of marketing. Case studies, testimonials, ratings, reviews, and even an indicator of the number of times a page was shared on Facebook can make people feel better about your products.

But not all social proof is equal. Some are more powerful, depending on the product and the audience. For instance, an endorsement from a basketball player on basketball sneakers is always going to ring louder than an endorsement from, well, anyone else.

The Dyson Corrale is a great landing page example. Notice how it uses three kinds of social proof: a rating system, customer reviews, and user-generated content from social media.

Remove Navigation and Distractions

Typically, a landing page is not for browsing. The purpose is for the visitor to consume the content and then move forward in the predetermined direction via the call-to-action.

This means any other opportunities on the page to navigate somewhere else are simple distractions. It’s best to eliminate or minimize them.

This means no header, footer, sidebar, or navigation menu. You might decide to make your logo clickable on your homepage so visitors don’t get stuck, but otherwise, only the call-to-action should be clickable.

Use Straight-Forward Calls-to-Action

Your landing page should provide plenty of information for visitors, but ultimately its goal is to encourage them to take the next step. This means you need a call-to-action.

Your call-to-action will depend on the purpose of the page. Landing pages generally don’t sell products, but they can. In most cases, your landing page will send the visitor to a product detail page, capture their email address, encourage them to share, etc.

For the best conversion rates, use simple and clear language for your calls to action. Don’t try to make them clever or witty. Get right to the point. For instance, Medik8’s regime-builder uses a simple, clear, and impossible-to-miss call to action.

We also find it helpful to use the first person in your calls to action. It helps the visitor identify with the action better. Here are some examples:

• Download My Free Guide
• Grab My Webinar Seat
• Choose My Subscription Tier

Finally, make sure your call to action fulfills its promise. If you promise a guide on the next screen, it must be there. Otherwise, you’ll lose all credibility.

Optimize for Search Engines and Google Shopping

Good SEO helps people find your pages through search engines. This is an important way to bring people to your page organically without spending money on ads.

Even better, you should optimize your pages specifically for Google Shopping. This can enhance your visibility and attract more potential customers to your site. Combined with a robust product feed, Google is more likely to display your products in their search results.

Here are some strategies to ensure your landing page is optimized for Google Shopping:

• Include relevant keywords and key attributes (brand, product type, color, size) in your product titles and product descriptions.
• Use high-resolution images that meet Google’s specifications.
• Implement structured data markup to provide Google with detailed information about your products, including price, availability, and reviews.
• Ensure that the information on your landing page matches the information in your Google Shopping product feed.
• Design your landing page to be clean, attractive, and easy to navigate.
• Ensure your landing page is device-friendly and mobile-friendly.
• Optimize your page for quick loading.
• Use clear, descriptive URLs that include relevant keywords.
• Optimize meta titles and descriptions to improve click-through rates from search results.
• Ensure your product feed is regularly updated to reflect accurate information.
• Use tools like Google Merchant Center to identify and fix any errors in your product feed.

Test and Optimize Your Page

It’s important to optimize your landing page over time through iterative testing. Use A/B testing or rapid tests to determine which elements are working/not working and how your page can better reach its customers and goals.

Testing can also benefit more than a specific landing page, as you can apply what you learn to other pages on your site or your organization as a whole.

Consider Your User to Deliver the Right Digital Journey

When deciding whether to drive traffic to a landing page for a product detail page, it’s important to think about the user and their journey. Landing pages are the right choice when paired with marketing campaigns—such as paid ads—because they create a seamless experience for the user.

We typically recommend driving traffic to a landing page for a better, tailored customer journey. However, there are a few niche cases where it’s right to send traffic directly to a product detail page.

If you aren’t sure which is right for your unique situation, connect with us. We can help you optimize your visitor’s digital experience by building an optimization program that keeps you focused on what is proven to move the needle.

Learn more about our Digital Experience Optimization Program.

The post Driving Paid Traffic To A Landing Page vs. Product Page: What Is Better? appeared first on The Good.

About This Episode:

SEO confuses a lot of people. In this week’s episode, Jon and Ryan tackle three big SEO myths that frequently come up when they’re talking to prospects and clients. 

They also discuss brand voice, compounding effects, domain authority, and site traffic. 

Listen to the full episode if you want to learn:

1. Why small brands and startups should still invest in SEO
2. Why SEO is like growing your own apple tree
3. How SEO is different from paid search
4. What the minimum budget for SEO is 
5. Why you still need SEO even when you have a SaaS platform
6. Why not all traffic is equal

If you have questions, ideas, or feedback to share, hit us up on Twitter. We’re @jonmacdonald and @ryangarrow.

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Episode Transcript:

Announcer:
You’re listening to Drive and Convert, a podcast about helping online brands to build a better e-commerce growth engine with Jon MacDonald and Ryan Garrow.

Jon:
So Ryan, I’m always confused about SEO and I know that might a lot of people are.

Ryan:
That makes two of us.

Jon:
Well, this is going to be a very interesting episode then because I think you’re going to tell us today about three myths in SEO.
And ones that most commonly come up is you’re talking with prospects and clients in your day-to-day, I do think that SEO is way more expensive than it should be. I think that results on the work are always out four to six months, which is the way it should be with SEO. It’s a compounding effort. But I do think there’s a lot of myths out there and is a lot of black hat stuff that people promote. My gut can tell me what’s the best between those two and what I should and shouldn’t do from a moral standpoint maybe. But I still think there’s a lot of myths out there right?

Ryan:
There are. Maybe this ends up as quite a few part series maybe because I know there’s more than three myths.

Jon:
There are. I’m sure there’s hundreds. We could do a podcast just on this probably.

Ryan:
Probably.

Jon:
But I want to hear your top three.

Ryan:
Okay.

Jon:
So how did you choose three? We’ll talk about three. How’d you choose three today?

Ryan:
Well, it’s in the conversations, anything I repeat a lot of times I’m like, okay, this is obviously a pretty consistent conversation or thought process that’s happening among these businesses. And just the general bell curve, the majority of businesses I talk to end up being less than $5,000,000 online. So in that S and [inaudible 00:01:48] bucket. When I’m talking to the masses, some of the larger businesses or brands you and I work with, most of them, I can’t say that as a fact, but a lot of them have, through trial and error, figured out a lot of the myths and been like, okay, we do need to be investing in SEO doing these things because they’ve either hired somebody that knew how to do it or they were like, hey, we started having negative things happen and oh, we weren’t doing SEO.

Jon:
Those bigger brands, though, they have the money to do trial and error.

Ryan:
They do, yeah. You can run some SEO and it fails. You’re like, okay, well at least we had the other SEO going that was working. And I think a lot of brands should be doing trial and error pretty consistently but it’s just on a much smaller scale when you’re small and you may not be able to test much in the SEO world. Because as you said at the beginning, it is expensive. It’s one of the larger line items by itself. If you look at paid search as a whole, paid search is probably larger and it includes the spend. But when you’re breaking out the management fee, generally an agency’s getting paid a management fee for paid search and SEO and the SEO is usually larger.

Jon:
Well, I think there’s more effort hand-to-hand combat that goes into SEO, right? Where in my view, and again, this could just be a myth that I have, paid search is you set it up and then you’re spending money at Google. And yeah, you can tweak it, et cetera, but you’re basically just letting Google spend money at that point. Where with SEO, you need to continually be doing content, trying to go out and contact people to get back links. Every single thing you can do for SEO that I can think of off the top of my head that is not black hat is typically something that requires effort and time where that’s going to cost more money.

Ryan:
True. And I think a lot of the smaller businesses I’ve talked to that have just been successful businesses, I think, many of the owners had a background in SEO where they knew they could do a lot of their own work. So that large expense was their time, not actually a cash out of the business. So that could also just be, hey, there’s some value here because everybody likes to refer to it as the free clicks. Maybe that’s my myth sub point. There are no free clicks on the internet. They’re costing someone somewhere somehow to get traffic. Whether you paid for it six months ago or you paid for it right at the click, it costs money.

Jon:
All right, so what’s the first myth then?

Ryan:
The first one I come up across a lot, it’s kind of just a main point as well, that small brands don’t need to be investing in SEO until they’re bigger. And I can honestly see how brand owners get to this point or viewpoint because I’ve been there. If you look at all of your top non-brand keywords that are driving sales through Google Ads, you’re going to see Amazon, Walmart, Nordstrom and much larger competitors that dominate the top of the queries. You’re so far behind them as a brand new site, why try, at the end of the day?

Jon:
Yeah. But they’ve been there forever and that’s why they’re up there, right?

Ryan:
Exactly. So you’re not going to go do SEO today and then in six months overtake Amazon, Walmart, Target, Nordstrom, that are already at the top four. It’s not going to happen unless you get crazy lucky or black hat and then it goes away anyway. You also have to understand, though, that every 90 days on Google, 15% of the searches that are being done on Google haven’t been done before. And so there’s constantly new stuff.

Jon:
Wow. 15%?

Ryan:
15%. Now that stat is probably a couple years old. I don’t know how much has changed. But that’s been a pretty consistent still stat coming from Google for a while that-

Jon:
That’s crazy, yeah.

Ryan:
There’s a lot of new things. And a lot of that is going to be weird trends or you get some crazy TikTok thing. Nobody had probably ever looked at the whatever, the ice bucket challenge before that happens. You’re like all of a sudden ice bucket challenge. What do you mean? Oh, well there’s a few million searches for it and there never have been before.
To capture those though, you have to be doing something. So doing nothing means it’s going to be very hard to capture them when they come up. But there’s a piece of your site called domain authority, which is how Google and search engines see your site and say, how relevant is this and is it in a good neighborhood? The higher your domain name, the more exclusive your gated community essentially. And all of the back links going into that essentially give you more and more access to better and better communities, if you will.
And so SEO from a broad stroke standpoint includes content, the blogs and the content you’re putting on your site, which is on a collection or a category page. What’s the description you’re putting on there? What’s the title you’re putting at the top? All of that is SEO. And if you’re not paying somebody that’s an expert for that, that means the business owner. And if you don’t have a background in SEO, you are likely not the best person to be writing that content or choosing some of those keywords.

Jon:
Oh, this is the same thing I say all the time around reading a label from inside the jar. You know your products. You’re not going to be able to work in the phrases or words for somebody who is new to file, has no idea what the product is.

Ryan:
Yeah, and there’s some basic things maybe, but you might need a nuance within your words to have a chance to show for certain terms. Because you’re going to be starting more long tail rather than saying, I’ve come across some new sites, their category is men’s. I was like, well, I mean technically those are men’s shirts, but let’s maybe make it men’s fitted t-shirts because you’re much more likely to be able to spend money on that type of term and make it work. You’re not going to spend money on paid search on the word men’s. And this title category H one tag and content you’re putting on that page allows you to get a higher quality score. So it’s SEO technically by what the work is being done by, but it has a positive impact on your paid search campaigns, which is likely where you’re spending more of your time and energy.

Jon:
So would you recommend that a founder who maybe isn’t technical SEO but can write enough to… Would you recommend that to save some money and get things rolling, they take the first pass and then hand that off to a technical SEO person?

Ryan:
I don’t think that’s a bad thing at all. And I think that it’s probably… This is a horrible broad statement, but I make a lot of those on this podcast. It’s probably easier for an SEO person to revamp something that you’ve already done and say, okay, you’ve got the title, the H tag, the description. I can see what you’re doing here. I’m just going to insert some keywords, make it flow a little better, make it more relevant to the paid search terms there. I see you’ve got a blog there. Step one, I don’t have to set up the blog as an SEO. You’ve already got it. Let’s just add one in there.
I will say this too. If you are a business owner or a marketing team and you are already in the habit of writing content or a blog and you bring an SEO agency or individual in to do some of that, you’re going to see what they’re doing and you’re going to be able to pick up some of that from them and be like, oh, I saw what they did with the keywords on that blog, that was a good idea. I’ll do that on my next one as well. And so you’ll be able to learn from that just by observing like, hey, they’re a quality SEO. I see what you did with the title, how you spaced it. Oh, I see how you used H tags within that document. I can do that as well when I put my own content out there.
So I think it’s valuable for a company to do their own content regardless of their size. Cause I think there’s a brand voice as well. And our team, for example, does a lot of SEO. We do a really good job. But one of the things that becomes difficult is really getting a external writer to understand brand voice and execute that. And so if you’ve got a really key brand you’re building and you want the voice a certain way, you’re probably going to want a content person. Maybe your social media person internally really understands that because they’re taking the pictures, they’re putting the content, responding to people. That person might write a better on-site blog from a brand voice perspective. And then you just run that through your SEO team to say, hey, I need to make sure this has got the right keyword density and it’s mocked up correctly to maximize the SEO juice we’re going to get from this blog. And we do that for quite a few clients as well.

Jon:
Okay, awesome. What’s the second myth that you’d like to chat about today?

Ryan:
In this one we kind of took [inaudible 00:09:50]. SEO is expensive and it’s far outside my budget. That can be true but I would say more likely it’s false, it is a myth. And I tell companies that you better not speak to just one SEO company. There’s going to be multiple ways to price it. There’s going to be multiple options within the space. There’s some things you will want as a brand hiring SEO company. You need to make sure there’s transparency. You need to make sure that there are a list of things that the agency is responsible for and timelines associated with that. There needs to be a lot of integrity and follow through from an SEO agency that if they can put that in front of you and then execute against that, that’s a very, generally very good agency.
But I’ll let everybody in a little bit under the hood for an agency real quick. In that almost all agency pricing boils down to an hourly rate you’re paying your employees and the markup that you need to cover overhead, owner pay or distributions and also be competitive. But it all boils down to hourly pay. Like SEO, they might charge you $2,000 a month for SEO, but they know that that’s going to be this many hours and this is their markup to make it work. They’re not just going to throw $2,000 out there and not pay attention to the hours going into that to make sure they’re profitable. And so yeah, you’re not getting unlimited work for $2,000. So just to understand that most agencies that are doing white hat SEO and have integrity and have a good reputation are not going to be gauging you and charging an astronomical rate because they’ll lose clients very quickly by somebody saying-

Jon:
Too much competition.

Ryan:
Yeah, I’ve paid you five grand. You did easily a thousand dollars of work. And I can see the hours from a business perspective.

Announcer:
You’re listening to Driving Convert a podcast focused on e-commerce growth. Your hosts are Jon MacDonald, founder of The Good, a conversion rate optimization agency that works with e-commerce brands to help convert more of their visitors into buyers, and Ryan Garrow of Logical Position, the digital marketing agency offering paper click management, search engine optimization, and website design services to brands of all sizes. If you find this podcast helpful, please help us out by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts and sharing it with a friend or colleague. Thank you.

Jon:
Let me ask you this, what is the minimum budget you would put towards SEO? Just to get started, right? If you don’t have X, then don’t even bother starting with SEO.

Ryan:
I would say you should probably be investing at least $1,500 bucks a month. I don’t think you need to be going 10 grand and really getting aggressive initially. And I think there’s some value to building up over time and seeing results and then doing more. But you can start small. And I would have an SEO team focus offsite almost exclusively. A good SEO agency knows how to get back links, quality back links, effectively. And so they can go out and do that and it would take you as a business owner a much longer to figure that out. Whereas you as a business owner can at least get a blog up and target the same keywords, which we’ll talk about probably a little later. But those back links go back and increase your domain authority and over time that compounds. And so I tell business owners as you’re starting your business, SEO is a spend now, get something later, marketing. Four to six months, you’re going to see the results of good SEO in four to six months. Paid search, you are spending now, getting now. And as a business owner, you like that because you’re seeing fruit very quick and it’s exciting. You’re like, ah, I spent a hundred bucks and I made $150 in profit, life is great. SEO that’s not going to happen.

Jon:
Yeah, I’ve told people it’s like growing apples versus going to the store and buying them. You can go buy apples and you have apples and you can make an apple pie, do whatever you want to do with them. And that’s paying Google for traffic. You put money in, you get what you know you’re going to get back. But you could also grow your own apples and they’re free. And you could still have the same outcome of making apple pie. But you’re going to have to wait for that tree to mature and then it’s got a fruit and then you don’t know exactly how many apples you’re going to end up with. But it’s free.

Ryan:
You got to buy the tree.

Jon:
True.

Ryan:
And you got to spray for bugs or you get worms and things. So there is ongoing maintenance [inaudible 00:14:02]. Which is like SEO. There’s going to be some costs, but it’ll be much smaller. I might pay… Because we grow apples here and I’ve got, I don’t know, probably 15 apple and pear trees ballpark in it on property. And we bring somebody out in the spring that sprays this insecticide type organic thing that makes sure that worms don’t crawl in all my fruit. And that might cost me 200 bucks for all 15 trees. And so it’s like, yeah, that’s per tree somewhere around, let’s just say 10 bucks easy. That’s one week of apples at my house. And so I’m making money on it and my kids get to pick them and enjoy them and so there’s value there for me too. But I could sell them. I’ve got a lot of them. Instead they end up rotting and attracting bees and isn’t that great?

Jon:
There you go. Well, right. But I think you made a good point that there is some cost and some effort but that compounds over time in that you have the tree that matures, it gets bigger, it continues to fruit. Where ads you spend that money, you get it right back, but it’s gone.

Ryan:
Yeah.

Jon:
You’re not getting that money back. There’s no compounding effort there.

Ryan:
No. And I think the compound is the key thing that most people will get out of this point, is that look at SEO as as investing because it’s going to have compound interest. If I was smart when I was just out of college 22 and started saving, I would be in a much better spot for retirement now than I am. Because of the power of compound interest.

Jon:
You and me and everyone else I know.

Ryan:
The number of people that I knew when I was 22, 0 of us were investing for our future. It was beer and going clubbing. What a waste.

Jon:
Yeah. Somebody once told me that first car you bought when you got out of college, and it wasn’t anything fancy, but it was like if you had put that $23,000 bucks, whatever it was for the car back then into the market, what would that be worth today? And we did the math and I was just like, holy. Was that car really worth that? No, no. I could have, I should have biked everywhere.

Ryan:
Yeah. My ego tells me, oh, it was definitely worth it at the time.

Jon:
Yeah. But I didn’t have to bike everywhere, so I had some utility, but yeah.

Ryan:
22 year old Ryan was an idiot.

Jon:
Well. We all are. But okay, so depending on who you ask, I’m still an idiot.
What’s your third one? Now we know that okay, it’s going to cost some money, that it’s compounding and that you really need to invest early. What’s your third one?

Ryan:
This one is, there might be some flack for this, but there’s a lot of people that assume that if I pay for a SaaS platform or they do the hosting, then I don’t need to worry about technical SEO or site speed or any of those things. Because the Shopify, the big commerces, the Squarespace is the square spaces of the world, they’re just going to take care of it. And that’s why people do it because [inaudible 00:16:48] sucked when you had to host it yourself and it broke, or it was swaggy. SaaS, you’re fine.
And there were probably a lot of people on SaaS platforms in September last year that had that Google Court update come through that got very surprised when their top rankings dropped pretty significantly. And the problem is you’ve got multiple options within those platforms from a theme perspective. Just because somebody can make a theme on Shopify that looks really cool and is exactly how you want your brand to be portrayed, doesn’t mean that it’s going to load quick or appropriately on all devices and that Google’s going to love it from an SEO standpoint because usually those skill sets are very different. Not all the time, but usually. And so you’ll have apps you can add into Shopify are big commerce that are going to slow the load down that Google’s going to recognize that and be like, oh, your site’s loading slow. And it doesn’t appear that way but Google’s seeing it and saying, God, this app won’t load for 30 seconds, therefore we’re dinging you.
And so that Google core update in ’21 did impact not a small number of companies that I’ve seen as far as their top three, top 10, rankings dropping over the next few months. Some of them were able to figure it out quick enough and get those rankings back but a lot of them didn’t.
And it can be a business owner issue too. If you put a massive five megapixel giant image, that’s one of your images on a product page, Google, it’s not going to load quick and Google’s going to be like, yeah, what the heck are you doing? You need to shrink your images. And then if your descriptions aren’t very good, they’re like the one right out of the digital camera instead of actually what the product is, that’s not going to be great.
And I think more and more, I think there’s going to be, the algorithms on the search engines are going to be recognizing sites that are helping those with disabilities. And that’s been a… In the past, you’ve helped set your site up for people with disabilities specifically to avoid the lawsuit that some random lawyer’s going to find your site and send you a cease and desist or send you a lawsuit saying they just want to settle for five grand type of thing. And that was the pain enough to get people to switch. But I think the bigger one is going to be Google and Bing can start seeing some of that data and say, oh, well, you’re not compatible from an ADA standpoint, so forget it. And it might already be in the algorithm but…

Jon:
Yeah, I think it is to some degree. They want alt images and alt tags, things like that, that are good for them, helpful for them. Because let’s be honest, a bot is essentially very similar to some disabilities. Meaning that a bot can’t see color, a bot can’t always make out what an image is, so it needs the alt text. So you needs hierarchy tags, things of that sort to help you know what’s a header and what’s normal text, et cetera. So all of that stuff, if you’re in a screen reader, you are using a screen reader, all of that stuff’s important. And I think inherently some of that stuff’s baked in from what I understand, but yeah, I could see it taking more precedent for sure.
But I think it is interesting. A lot of people will pay to install something that prevents them from getting a lawsuit versus just fixing their site. Just fix the site, have a better customer experience, you’ll make more money.

Ryan:
Yeah. And honestly, those plugins, I’ve done a lot of research on this ’cause we have some partners that help clients. Just by putting that on there, you’re probably more likely to get sued because they know they don’t work very well and they’re like, oh you know this is a risk. You got a problem and you’re more likely to settle.

Jon:
It’s interesting you say that. I actually had a friend who put that on and then a month later. And they were like, no, no, but I put this on. They’re like, yeah, no, it doesn’t solve the key issues.

Ryan:
Yeah, because a built with list tells them, hey, who installed this in the last month?

Jon:
Yep, exactly.

Ryan:
There’s my prospect list as a lawyer.

Jon:
That’s exactly it.

Ryan:
I hate that.

Jon:
Yeah. So if you’re on a platform like a Shopify, big commerce, et cetera, you still need to do your own technical SEO. Be concerned about site speed. There are ways and factors in your control.

Ryan:
Yes.

Jon:
Is that-

Ryan:
Just don’t assume that the platform, because they are fast, big commerce and Shopify, in particular, very fast and will load very quick. They’ve done a great, both those companies have done a great job on the backend to make their platforms fast and look really good to Google. You can screw it up though. And just be careful because you probably will if you’re not paying attention to those things.

Jon:
Yeah, for a while, everybody was like, the Shopify site speed greater in the admin panel is the world’s biggest lie. And it’s like, well, they’re trying to tell you that you’re doing some things incorrectly and it’s not their platform. But it comes across as to uneducated Shopify users that it’s Shopify that’s slow. And it’s like, well, probably not.

Ryan:
No. You’ve done some things that are dumb probably.

Jon:
Well, okay, so I think you have a bonus.

Ryan:
Yeah, yeah. We do have a minute left. I had one on here just in case we had some time left. But it’s one that I think a lot of people assume as a business that all I need is traffic and once I get traffic, I’m good. Or once I get enough traffic, I just go to Jon and it’ll start converting. And once you’re in the space, I know that all traffic is not equal.
In fact, I have funny, funny anecdote, I’ll get through it quick. I had a partner come to me and say, hey, the current agency they’re working with sent this over to them, so they don’t know if they want to talk and they did a case study on them, so they must be happy. I’m like, oh, let me look at the case study. They were running Google Ads, had a $5,000 budget. They said, oh, we did a great job for this company. We got them 7,200 or 7,400 visitors at an average CPC of $1.45. It’s like, okay, next line. Nothing. That was it. They got 7,200, 7,400, visitors at a $1.41. I’m like, that’s weird. There’s no quality of that. And then the next sentence… And I did the math by the way, and it comes to $10,000, $10,148 or something-

Jon:
Which is not-

Ryan:
It looks like they overspent by about five grand so that doesn’t make any sense. That would piss me off as a brand. And then the next one was, yeah, and then we got… Over four months, we got 6,300 visitors for a $1.10. I wrote back and I was like, I really don’t know what the case study’s saying, but just sending traffic to site. I was like, because they were looking for guarantees if they went came to us. I’m like, I guarantee them I can get them more traffic cheaper. That part’s easy. I could spend… I’ll get, I’ll put a display net ad out there at a penny, get them half a million visitors for $5,000, they will get zero new clients out of this. But they got a lot, they got half a million visitors.
So all traffic’s not equal.

Jon:
Yes.

Ryan:
And you get a lot of people that have looked at information or found something that says, oh, you have the blog and that’s part of SEO. Which SEO, yes, is a big piece of SEO. But the point of blogs is really to have content on the site that can be back linked to. Because what search engines often don’t want those back links going to a product, they want them going to content. So content there, it gives you keyword density on the site. Let’s Google see that you’re regularly updating the site with content about the keywords and then also can build brand awareness for the brand. But blogs don’t get read a lot. You don’t find a lot of people spending time on blog. I mean, the last time I read a blog, well, I guess when I’m cooking, I will find a cooking blog and I read a Pinterest art… Pinterest usually leads to some stupid article that I have to skip, push the menu, get me to the recipe because I don’t care that grandma in the summer would open the windows in the smells. I’m like, give me the recipe. So technically I’m reading a blog, but I really just skipped it and went to the recipe. But the blogs aren’t there for the people to read. They’re there just for technical SEO things.
And so in the cooking example, I would personally, if I was trying to build a blog that would generate business for me, I probably wouldn’t go create a cooking blog. There are so many cooking blogs out there that the saturation, unless I had some really crazy unique thing to really get excited about a blog, you’ve got to probably focus on something that doesn’t have a lot of content already. We’ve got a client that’s in the beard oil space and they started blogging about beards like 10 years ago when there wasn’t a lot of people blogging about it. So they built up a lot of authority on Google of here’s how you care for your beard and you have long hair, here’s how you handle the in between phases. And so that was a great move for them because they did it early on in the space. Just don’t expect people to read your blog or come onto your blog and then come buy things off that necessarily. It’s usually not [inaudible 00:25:21].

Jon:
I say this all the time when people put blog in their main navigation of their site. It’s like, don’t send people back up the funnel. Your blog is the very tippy top of your funnel. The goal is to drive traffic. And you want… Once somebody has gone from your blog to your site, stop sending them back to the blog. You’re just sending them up the funnel. Or don’t even… If they land on a product detail page or even on your homepage, don’t send them. That’s further down the funnel. Don’t send them back up to the blog. So I think if you’re looking at that funnel, the blog is the absolute top. And the whole goal of that is to get a showing in search results and to get people to click through and come to your site. But then you very quickly want to get them to a conversion point or a shopping journey. And a blog just isn’t that.

Ryan:
No. And you’ll use remarketing on that probably and fill a funnel and use that. But generally speaking, you’re going to find a lot of traffic on blogs and analytics and people get excited about traffic. And you’re like, the revenue number on the right side of that analytics page shows $0.

Jon:
Yeah. Yeah.

Ryan:
And then the inverse people are like, my traffic dropped. Oh, we had a blog that fell off rankings for some reason but your revenue went up because the important pages got more traffic. So who cares about the traffic? It’s an ego thing but I’d rather have more money in the bank than a bigger ego.

Jon:
There you go.
All right, Ryan. Well, this has been entertaining. Thank you for the hot takes on SEO. I do think we could do more of these. I’d love to hear more of these. I think maybe next episode I’ll do hot takes on CRO and we can bounce this back and forth a few times. It’d be fun.

Ryan:
Works for me. Let’s do it.

Jon:
All right, sir.

Ryan:
All right. Have a good one Jon.

Jon:
Thank you.

Announcer:
Thanks for listening to Drive and Convert with Jon MacDonald and Ryan Garrow. To keep up to date with new episodes, you can subscribe at driveandconvert.com.

The post Drive and Convert (Ep. 074): Debunking Common SEO Myths appeared first on The Good.

Studies show that 68% of online shoppers search Google when they’re considering the purchase of a specific product. Users are information hunting, but when they see the variety of results and prices, they quickly go into comparison mode.

Our own research and user testing for clients confirm that the majority of users browsing the Google Shopping product listing ads are comparison shopping.

But your ecommerce business doesn’t have to be just a research pitstop before users go back to their Google search results, Amazon, or a competitor site to purchase.

In this guide, we’re sharing how you can optimize your Google shopping traffic. 

Our 7 strategies will help you better connect with shoppers to lower your bounce rate and help them find what they’re looking for.

7 strategies to optimize your Google Shopping traffic

If you are spending money on product listing ads in your Google Ads account, here are some strategies you can use to increase your conversion rate and return on ad spend (ROAS).

1. Understand what is important to your audience

While it might be tempting to start running Google Ads (formerly known as AdWords) without doing any customer interviews and user testing, that’s a guaranteed way to:

• Create a subpar bid strategy
• Waste a lot of your ad budget
• Have underwhelming metrics, like a low target ROAS

Conducting customer interviews and doing user testing allows you to pinpoint why users aren’t buying from you today and build a better shopping experience.

At The Good, we use Think Aloud protocol in our user testing. We find users with similar characteristics to the ideal customer profile, and ask them to talk us through their shopping experience. So, they might enter a specific search query, browse the Google Shopping results, and click through to a product page.

In this process, we can identify pain points, confusion, and anything standing in the way between desire and conversion.

For a more in-depth analysis of your customers’ journey, check out this video:

2. Use breadcrumbs to give users another place to go

Most people who land on your site through a Google Shopping ad will land on a product page. That means they aren’t familiar with your brand, your site navigation, or how to find other products you might sell.

Sites will often try to encourage people to continue shopping by adding breadcrumbs at the top of the product page. However, that doesn’t help people achieve what they really want, which is typically to go to the main related category.

In this chair example, Target creates more emphasis on site hierarchy and current product’s brand through font weight/proximity to product title. Providing better visibility into the breadcrumbs for a site with a large product catalog may help improve navigation for users landing on a product page.

‘Shop all Sierra Designs’ provides better information scent for users looking to shop more from that brand.

3. Run the “Etsy” test to offer meaningful alternatives

Remember: most people who land on your site from a Google product listing will be comparison shopping. They know the product they are looking for, but don’t necessarily know or care about your brand at this point.  

This means the standard practice of surfacing add-ons on the product page to increase average order value won’t be relevant to their needs.

Instead, aim to keep people on your site by surfacing appealing alternatives to the product they are already viewing. Let them comparison shop the products on your own site rather than comparing your brand to other Google Shopping listings.

One test that we run for brands doing a lot of paid search is the Etsy Test. Show similar products or “other customers also viewed” items to inspire on-site comparison.

Etsy displays similar items above the fold to encourage shoppers to stay on-site even if the product they landed on wasn’t quite the right fit.

4. Improve site speed and UX

Most people landing on your site from paid search won’t know a lot about your brand, so making a good first impression and matching user expectations can do a lot to decrease the likelihood that users will bounce from your site. Make sure the content in navigation aligns with user expectations, loads quickly, is scannable, and is easy to understand.  

This is particularly important for mobile. Review your Google Analytics, product data, and heat maps to see what users are doing on your online store:

• What content are they actually engaging with on your product landing pages?
• When was the last time you updated your Google Shopping feed to ensure the most up-to-date local inventory and prices are showing up?
• Are you using negative keywords? Hopefully! If so, when was the last time you reviewed your negative keywords list?
• Are they scrolling and seeing all of your product attributes and reading through reviews?
• Are there any key browsing differences between people who find this product from organic SEO vs. paid search ads vs. remarketing ad campaigns?

If most shoppers only see what’s above the fold, you may want to maximize above-the-fold visibility of the essentials like product name, price, any savings, star ratings, number of reviews, and images.

5. Display social proof to build trust

If you’re a lesser-known brand, you need to establish trust with shoppers immediately. Product ratings and reviews right on the product page are a great way to do this because they:

• Allow shoppers to see what customers think about the product and shopping experience—in their own words
• Prove this is a legitimate brand, not just a great product
• Demonstrate why people should buy from your site vs. a competitor

In the example above, Leatherman features a review snippet below the product image to improve visibility and draw attention to review highlights and star rating.

6. Incentivize folks to purchase from you through meaningful differentiation

Another key to converting more Google Shopping traffic is emphasizing meaningful differentiation through incentives.

Make it clear why shoppers should buy from you. This could be by making the quality clear, offering lowest price guarantees, longer warranties, priority support, etc. If not, they may use your site as a research guide, and ultimately buy a similar product on Amazon.

Backcountry counters this objection by offering a lowest price guarantee right at the top of the product page.

Pro Tip: While price matching or price guarantees can work well, you don’t have to always compete on price. You can also use special offers like free shipping, free gift with purchase, loyalty programs, or priority support. 

7. Demonstrate shared values

What’s your secret sauce?

Do you have a specific mission that your company stands for?

And why should people buy from your brand instead of from Amazon or a competitor?

Getting clear on your unique value proposition and then surfacing that strategically on your website, including in your product page copy, can help you convert more visitors into paying customers.

Ten Trees uses tiles and copy on the category page to demonstrate shared values (e.g. sustainable essentials, goodbye fast fashion), which activate in-group bias and reciprocity bias.

Optimize your Google Shopping traffic and convert comparison shoppers

Most people who come to your site from paid search are comparison shopping.

Their first impression of your brand will most likely come from clicking on one of the Google results and going right to a product page.

This means you need to meet them where they are. Consider ways that you can deliver a better user experience on your landing page to encourage comparison shopping your products rather than leaving to compare with a Google shopping competitor result.

This might include surfacing related products in the same category, displaying social proof, or communicating shared values.

By implementing the right tactics, you can lower your bounce rate and increase the likelihood of shoppers buying from you.

The post How to Optimize Your Google Shopping Traffic and Improve Your Ecommerce Bounce Rate   appeared first on The Good.

But how do you know how much your paid traffic is costing you or how much revenue you’re generating from each dollar you spend to get shoppers to your site?

Most companies use a handful of key ecommerce metrics to track and measure success, including return on investment (ROI), cost per click (CPC), average order value (AOV), and return on ad spend (ROAS).

And while most marketing professionals understand how to calculate and track essential metrics, defining ROAS or explaining the difference between ROAS and ROI seems difficult for many.

So let’s fix that.

We’ll take a deeper look at what ROAS is, the formula to calculate it, and how smart use of optimization can improve your bottom line (aka, increase your amount of revenue) without having to increase your marketing budget. 

Here’s what you’ll find in this article: 

• What is ROAS?
• How to calculate ROAS
• How is ROAS different from ROI?
• Why is calculating ROAS important in ecommerce?
• What is a good ecommerce ROAS ratio?
• Increase Your ROAS: How to Improve Your Advertising Results 
• Get Better Results from Your Ad Spend

What is ROAS?

ROAS is a way to measure the spend efficiency of your advertising campaigns — a ratio of how much revenue you generate per every dollar spent on advertising.

Other metrics (such as click-through rate or conversion rate) are meaningful in their own right, but they don’t address whether or not your money is being spent as wisely as possible. ROAS provides a zoomed-out look at whether or not a specific campaign is paying off, financially speaking.

Not quite sure how this plays out? Let’s pretend you’re using an ATM:  

Scenario #1: You put one dollar in and get $5 back. That’s positive ROAS.

Scenario #2: You put one dollar in and get .50 cents back. That’s negative ROAS.

If you experienced scenario #1, you’d put as many dollars as possible into that machine, right? If you had scenario #2, you wouldn’t put any more money into that machine.

An ad campaign is similar to an ATM machine with different outcomes. You want to find the ones that turn one dollar into more dollars, not the ones that turn dollars into cents.

A reminder: ROAS is similar to ROI, but they’re not the same. 

• ROAS only looks at the monetary return from a specific ad campaign.
• ROI measures the return of a larger investment (all Facebook advertising, for example).
  

Image source

How to calculate ROAS for your ecommerce business

Now that ROAS as a metric makes a bit more sense, here’s how you calculate it. ROAS is the ratio of the revenue generated from an ad campaign compared to the cost of the campaign.

ROAS calculation looks like this:

Here’s an example: Let’s say you allocate $5,000 of yourmarketing budget to a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign. By tracking the clicks that the campaign generated and following them through to check-out, you’re able to determine that those clicks generated $15,000 in sales. 

To calculate your ROAS you’d divide $15,000 by $5,000, so every dollar of ad spend resulted in $3.00 worth of sales. (In your ad management platform, this would display as a 3x ROAS.)

And referring back to our ATM example, that means for every dollar you put in you’d get $3 back. 

Makes sense, right?

How is ROAS different from ROI?

Here’s where some of the confusion comes in. Some marketers say, “Hey, the net revenue is really $10,000. You have to subtract the advertising costs from sales resulting from the ads to get the true figure.”

And that’s true… if you’re calculating return on investment.

Here’s how to calculate ROI:

And here’s how that looks, using our example: (15,000 – 5,000) x 100 / 5,000 = 20% ROI

See the difference? 

Return on Investment is one measure of the profitability of your business. It is a ratio of net revenue to the expense required to obtain that revenue. Both metrics, ROAS and ROI, are important to track and monitor. It is essential, though, that there is agreement on how each metric is derived, and that they are always calculated in the same way. Otherwise, you can be deceived by movements in the results. 

Why is calculating ROAS important in ecommerce?

ROAS tells you how much money you’re getting in return for every dollar you spend on advertising. It’s an essential metric for evaluating how well your advertising campaigns performed and how they contribute to your store’s bottom line. 

To help keep costs in check, marketing professionals often use a target ROAS when planning campaigns. To estimate how much revenue you expect to get back from an ad spend, reverse engineer the formula. (Advertisers, for example, often do this to develop a target ROAS for their Google AdWords campaigns.) 

Marketing and advertising campaigns play a big role in brand awareness, sale promotions, and introducing new products. In short, these campaigns often lead to sales, and knowing how efficient your campaigns are is imperative if you want to increase sales. 

Calculating ROAS and using that data helps ecommerce companies increase clicks — driving traffic and hopefully boosting sales. 

And on the flip side, if you’re actively monitoring ROAS you’re able to turn off unprofitable campaigns quickly — so you aren’t throwing away money promoting ads that aren’t converting well.

What’s a low ROAS and a high ROAS for an ecommerce company?

Your target ROAS should be the average conversion value that you’re expecting to receive for every dollar you spend on an advertisement. The target will vary according to the company and the product being sold, but three to five times return on ad spend ratio are good numbers to aim for.

What are ecommerce companies seeing in terms of ad performance? Let’s take a look at how Google, Facebook, Instagram, and Amazon ecommerce ads performed in 2020, according to one report:

Google shopping: ROAS improved 3% year over year.

Facebook ads: ROAS improved 29% year over year.

Instagram ads: ROAS improved by 11% year over year.

Amazon ads: ROAS remained around 7.95.

Expect average ROAS to change heading into the new year. Adobe is predicting that 2022 will be the first trillion-dollar year for ecommerce (which will likely alter the cost of ads, purchasing trends and consumer habits).

Of course, a brand’s ideal ROAS will vary depending on what stage the business is in. New ecommerce stores might operate with higher margins and others could be able to afford higher advertising costs. Your target ROAS will likely change over time and per campaign. 

When optimization is properly implemented, your return on ad spend ratio can jump up significantly (more on that later). 

At The Good, we tend to say a good ROAS can double your investment, and (more importantly) is a metric that keeps improving through the diligent application of optimization and a rigorous testing protocol. 

ROAS tracking helps you evaluate the effectiveness of your advertising and marketing efforts. When combined with customer lifetime value (CLV), ROAS provides insight into where you should invest your marketing dollars to receive the most impactful results.

Increase Your ROAS: How to Improve Your Advertising Results 

Remember that ROAS is determined by dividing the total revenue produced from your ads, by the cost of those ads. If revenue increases — but ad spend remains the same — your ROAS will grow. 

An ad campaign can perform poorly due to a number of reasons: poor audience targeting, a low click-through rate (i.e., poor creative), or a low conversion rate.

While we might not be design experts, we do know a lot about conversions.

Investing in conversion optimization doesn’t just help your ad campaigns, it helps you make the most out of ALL of your site traffic, which is why we recommend starting there.

How can you increase your ROAS? It’s simple: through optimization. You can use optimization to:

• Remove friction and convert more people who click on your ads into paying customers.
  
• Optimize your landing pages and product pages to ensure a seamless shopping experience so consumers will want to buy more (increase average order value).
  
• Reduce cart abandonment, meaning more people make it on through to completing a purchase on your site. 

There are multiple touch points that occur between an advertisement and payment. You can (and should) use optimization to smooth out the path to conversion at any (or all) potential pain points.

By removing friction in the user path, you’ll create a seamless buying experience for your customers. Believe it or not, we’ve seen ecommerce websitesdouble their ROAS after engaging in an optimization program.

It’s not uncommon for our agency to engage with a client that’s prepared to give up on pay-per-click advertising altogether. We frequently hear from ecommerce brands that PPC advertising just isn’t suited for their business, or that it’s a waste of time and resources. 

Here’s the thing: after we apply sound optimization principles to landing pages and the checkout procedure, and that same business gives PPC another shot, they’re always surprised by the difference that optimization had on the efficiency of their campaigns. 

Get Better Results from Your Ad Spend

By determining your present ROAS, then incorporating the principles of optimization, you’ll be well on your way to improving your company’s ROAS for their future advertising efforts and digital marketing campaigns.

Next steps:

1. Calculate your current ROAS and ROI.
2. Use your current expenses to calculate your target ROAS.
3. If you’re not hitting your target, audit the product pages your ads are linked to. 

The post Improving ROAS: How to Increase Your Return on Advertising Spend appeared first on The Good.

The iOS 15 update is right around the corner. 

Like you, we’ve seen plenty of advice and content out there covering what the update is, how it will impact ecommerce, and what other channels brands should pursue to establish a safety net for costs and privacy issues. 

But, even with all the ecommerce content floating around on the topic, there’s something crucial that isn’t being considered: conversion rate optimization. 

In this article, we’ll cover the perfect storm that brought us to our current reality, how marketers can get smarter in light of updates, and why CRO could be the solution to your challenges. 

How data and ecommerce has changed in 2020 and 2021

As my friend Ryan Garrow mentioned on the recent podcast we did on the topic, 2020 and 2021 have been “weird.”

Not only has the world been shut indoors as a result of the pandemic, but the data from the times has been bizarre, to say the least. 

For most of 2020, people were forced to do their shopping online. Retail locations were closed and so ecommerce was booming. During the height of the pandemic, many sites got away with poor user experience because shoppers had no option but to purchase online. 

Additionally, consumers spent countless hours scrolling on their phones and became more and more comfortable with mobile commerce. 

This meant a record year for lots of ecommerce brands.

Then, just as the world started opening in 2021, there was an iOS 14.5 update that limited Facebook tracking abilities. The data that was used to target ads to specific users and track the ways users are engaging with those ads, was restricted.

Not only were more people leaving the house and shopping in person, but as a result of the data restrictions, ecommerce brands were also getting a bad return on ad spend from Facebook.

A real example from an interior decor store

Here’s an example from an interior decor store that has been advertising on Facebook for almost 7 years. 

The store’s target audience has always been women on iPhones, and before the April 2021 iOS 14.5 update, Facebook’s algorithm worked. For every dollar spent, the store would get about $3 in revenue. 

After the update, every dollar spent resulted in 75 cents in revenue. 

The store didn’t have money to burn, so the Facebook ads got turned off. 

“That wasn’t an uncommon scenario after that switch [iOS 14.5] happened,” according to Ryan and the Logical Position team. 

Unless you are flush with capital, you’re probably still floundering with the iOS 14.5 update, and there’s even more to consider. 

The perfect storm is driving CPCs up and transaction value down

So there’s already a perfect storm for this year’s challenges when you look at: 

• Decreasing transaction volume as the world starts opening up and people begin shopping in person again
• Challenges with Facebook advertising because of the iOS 14.5 update
• Bad forecasting off of record 2020 numbers, which can set unrealistic expectations

Then there is one final added factor. 

In the height of the pandemic, ecommerce sales were through the roof, which meant that even two of the world’s biggest retailers – Walmart and Amazon – were having trouble keeping up with fulfillment.

As a result, they “turned off the spigot” by shutting down their ad campaigns, which drastically reduced the Cost per Click (CPC) in auctions.

Because of this, most of 2020 was a favorable time for brands to run advertising because their costs were down and their return on ad spend was way up.

But now Amazon and Walmart have re-entered the competition for ad space, which means costs are significantly higher and ad performance is lackluster.

Combine that with the recent privacy updates included with iOS 15 and most brands are scrambling to figure out what to do.

Many brands are overspending to make up for the lost results, but instead, you should ask yourself, how can I take the extra money that I need to buy customers in the current landscape and instead use it to build a better online experience that drives conversions?

How investing in CRO can make ad spend more effective

If your site goes from a conversion rate of, let’s say 2% to 2.5%, you just increased revenue 25% without increasing traffic. 

That’s huge. 

So, by investing in CRO, you make better use of the traffic you’re already generating rather than investing more money to produce traffic that may not convert anyways. 

With CPCs going up, you need to make sure you give visitors a great on-site experience so you can see a better return on that ad spend.

Check out our CRO calculator to input some numbers from your site and see potential ROI. 

Right now, many brands are approaching The Good because they’ve had this realization. They notice that their ad spend is a black hole that isn’t necessarily converting. 

Additionally, their site isn’t performing as well as it did last year, possibly because visitors had no other option but to shop online. There were plenty of factors that made it easy for consumers to convert, or I should say, to ignore the items that would prevent them from converting now.

That isn’t the case anymore. Consumers are out, their social calendars are packed, and they have more distractions (and alternatives) to prevent them from completing their purchase. 

So CRO is more important than ever. It helps with ROAS and it helps you compete with retail.

As Apple adds privacy with iOS 15, they take away data tracking

Ok, now that we’ve covered how we got to where we are today, let’s talk more about the looming iOS 15 update that’s on everyone’s mind. 

A few of the pending challenges for ecommerce managers are: 

• Apple is introducing a standard VPN for iCloud accounts. It’s going to make your browsing more anonymous, and data tracking much more difficult.
• Apple will no longer do in-email tracking, so brands won’t have visibility into open rates.

This might sound detrimental to you if your brand relies heavily on external data for success and measurement. But don’t fret. Conversion rate optimization can help here as well. 

Our Director of Marketing, James Sowers, spoke to Klaviyo on the topic and reinforced an important point, “[Our] colleagues in pay-per-click and search engine optimization have been dealing with this for years. For the most part, you don’t always know exactly what’s going to work. You have to form a hypothesis, test the hypothesis, and then confirm or deny it.”

Focus on what you can control: on-site data, user experience, and smart marketing

Use on-site data to measure success 

If you don’t already have Google Analytics aggregating data for you, pause here and go turn it on. 

There is power in your on-site data. Tracking how people engage with your site, their experience, their customer journey, what path they are taking, how they are converting, and where they are dropping off.. That’s just the beginning. 

Heatmaps, click maps, and scroll maps will help you uncover nuggets of insight that will further your understanding. 

It’s different from the individual data you’re used to, but you still can understand how your audience as a whole is engaging with your site. That’s more important than ever.

At the end of the day, what matters is the sale. So measuring success based on open rates of emails or click-throughs of ads might be working for you now, but with these changes remember that the ultimate measurement of success is the conversion.

Your website should be an extension of your product and brand

Changes to privacy and data further emphasize something we’ve been saying for a long time: your website is just as important as the product you sell. 

Your marketing might be great, and you might have the best product on the planet, but if your website doesn’t make it fun and easy for consumers to make a purchase, they will go somewhere else. 

Think about it this way, if you had a retail store 30 years ago, your store is a part of your product. Nordstrom became a success because of their store, their people, their return policy: the entire shopping experience was a ‘product’ of Nordstrom. 

If you’re an online retailer, it should be the same. Your website is an extension of your brand and your product.

Get smarter with your promotions and offers 

As CPCs and advertising costs go up, brands can no longer afford to devalue their products with discounts and percentages off. 

Brands are already losing money driving people to their site, so you shouldn’t and can’t also offer a popup discount when a visitor arrives at your site. Marketers need to get smarter with their promotions, focusing on deals that add value like free shipping, bundle offers, or free gift with purchase. 

CRO is the answer to the challenges of data and privacy updates 

‘Future you’ will thank ‘present you’ if you begin to invest in conversion optimization now. 

Instead of spending more money on ads or worrying about lost data, leverage CRO to combat the challenges of data and privacy updates. We know that CRO works, and we have the client success to prove it. 

If you don’t know where or how to get started, sign up for a free landing page assessment below. 

The post iOS 15 & Why CRO Is More Important Than Ever appeared first on The Good.

Ecommerce VPs often tell us their budget planning often turns into a power struggle. When all’s said and done, a few people are happy, but others are in despair, thinking “How can we get the work done without the money to afford it?”

Morale can bottom out, and optimism can turn into focusing on the impossible.

Marketing leaders need insight into how to manage their marketing budget most effectively, and that’s exactly what we’re covering here. 

Here’s what to come: 

• How to create a marketing budget
• Allocating your ecommerce marketing budget
• Best practices for marketing budget allocation (with examples) 

We’re going to present a rational, numbers-based, and fair approach to budgeting that can cut down on the headaches and end up boosting team spirit around marketing efforts instead of throwing water on the fire.

This post will highlight our recommended approach to allocating your marketing budget for maximum value and ROI.

How to Create a Marketing Budget

To create an effective ecommerce marketing budget, you need to first align departmental goals with business goals. Often, these are not going in the same direction. 

Think about it this way, if you’re a skincare brand your goals might be something like: 

• Sales team: reach a revenue goal for facial cleansers
• Business development team: build partnerships with national online retailers to distribute lotions
• Marketing team: increase website traffic with a promotion on under-eye cream

Even if at the end of the quarter if each team meets their silo-ed goals, revenue won’t be nearly what it could have been if all three teams had aligned around the one common business goal. 

This won’t be easy, but it’s worth having a hard conversation before setting your marketing budget. 

Once business and marketing goals have been established, follow the below steps to craft a marketing budget that is sure to drive results. 

• Outline your sales funnel
• Conduct a marketing audit
• Set your marketing budget

Let’s start with outlining your sales funnel. 

Outline Your Sales Funnel 

What is the path customers are taking before arriving to purchase and how can your marketing budget address any gaps or sticking points? 

A tactical and data-backed way to analyze your sales funnel is using your ecommerce website’s Google Analytics Goal Flow report as a supplement to any qualitative outline you build.

This report shares insight on how visitors to your ecommerce website are navigating the journey from awareness, to interest, to desire, and to sales. Use the report to establish a typical funnel towards conversions, and point out the stuck points in the customer journey. 

Since we’re talking about a marketing budget, I’m also going to emphasize the need to understand how customers become aware of your store or your product. Consider elements like social media, email marketing, word of mouth, and Google. One of the best ways to contextualize the data you gather from Google Analytics is with customer research. 

Another helpful exercise is a more specific sales funnel analysis for ecommerce brands: conversion funnel analysis. This identifies the weak points in the customer journey specifically related to your online presence. 

Your website is likely the most important part of your brand and sales journey for customers, so it’s best to have an understanding of what is working and what isn’t.

Conduct a marketing audit 

Now that you have an understanding of your sales and conversion funnel, it’s time to take a look at the marketing strategies you already have in place and how they can be improved.

Use a critical eye to determine, are your current marketing tactics helping you to reach your previously established business goals? 

• Google Analytics: There is an overwhelming amount of helpful data in Google Analytics to consider as you build a marketing strategy, so we put together the 5 reports essential to any ecommerce business. Set these up if you haven’t already, and run through the data and metrics to find areas that your marketing (and other arms of the business) can be improved. 

• Competitive analysis and website benchmarking: Conduct competitive research on your industry. But while you do this, remember, you do not know if their strategies are working or not. This is simply a good way to get a feel for your category landscape. Once you have some qualitative ideas, check out our guide on website benchmarking for quantitative competitive analysis.

This marketing audit will help you establish two key steps in building your budget: identifying what strategies are getting the best results, and what strategies you are missing. Tailor your marketing plan accordingly.

Set Your Marketing Budget

Now let’s establish some guidelines as you set a portion of your overall budget towards marketing.

In an annual survey of Chief Marketing Officers across industries, the percentage of budget allocated towards marketing has held consistent between 10% and 13% for the past eight years. This same statistic as a percent of total revenue ends up anywhere from 5% to 12%. 

These statistics hold true when compared with another source. The U.S. Small Business Administration suggests companies allocate 7-8% of their gross revenue towards marketing and advertising. This would be 10-12% of net revenue.

It is also interesting to note that generally, smaller businesses allocate a larger percentage of their budget towards marketing (we’ll dive into some specifics on that below). 

Based on these guidelines, consider your total organizational budget (or revenue from the past year) and set your budget accordingly. The research and analysis you did in steps one and two should help you convince leadership why you need budget for your efforts and how you’ll be adjusting allocation based on your findings.

How to Allocate Your Marketing Budget 

When we look at the proposed marketing budget breakdown with our clients, one thing is almost always apparent: imbalance.

Whether because one manager carries more influence than another, past experience pushes more of the chips in a certain direction, or some other reason – marketing budgets and marketing activities tend to go heavy in one area and light in another (like a guerrilla marketing campaign).

To counteract that tendency, we urge management to create three primary budget columns: Branding, Traffic, and Conversion Rate Optimization.

Branding

Branding seeks to position your company as the leader in your niche. When someone brings up the products or services you supply, branding helps make sure you’re the first name mentioned.

This column will likely be the hardest to track a return on investment, but no matter how well you do at traffic and CRO, if people don’t know, like, and trust your company, sales are going to be tough to get.

Traffic

We place paid and organic traffic in the same budgeting group. Both are concerned with generating traffic, and both require funding. 

This bucket is key to driving consumers to your website. According to a study, search traffic generated 65% of total ecommerce sessions, with 33% generated through organic search and 32% was generated through paid search.

It’s a mistake to think of organic traffic as “free.” It is not. Whether you pay (in-house or a marketing agency) for search engine optimization (SEO) work or (more sustainably) prepare content for your website to draw visitors in, organic traffic requires funding.

Most companies should look first to their organic (owned) traffic for a steady, ample flow of visitors – then use paid traffic as a way to augment and shore up the numbers. Beware of underfunding the organic effort, then ending up having to overspend on advertising and pay-per-click campaigns.

You can do an excellent job of branding, but if you don’t have traffic lanes set up to get your offers in front of your prospects, how will you make sales? Branding is critical to marketing, but so is traffic.

Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)

Your audience knows who you are and believes you can solve one or more of their problems better than anyone else.

You have traffic systems in place to direct those who need the solutions you offer to your website and landing pages.

Sounds like the perfect set-up, but one huge factor is still missing: conversion rate optimization (CRO). If you struggle to turn visitors into buyers, you’ve spent your branding and traffic budget unwisely.

You’re not in business to pay for getting people to your site, you’re in business to help them through the process of buying from you. And THAT is the job of conversion rate optimization.

The interesting thing is that CRO is one of the main areas ecommerce brands miss when allocating their time and resources (like their marketing budget). 

HubSpot calculates that only 17% of marketers use landing page A/B tests to improve conversion rates. Yet, CRO tools have an average ROI of 223%. 

It really pains us to see this happen because the truth is, CRO can have the greatest ROI compared to many other marketing strategies you may utilize (SEO, traffic generation, social media, etc). 

You should try out our in-depth ROI of Conversion Rate Optimization Calculator to help estimate the potential ROI you could be receiving from conversion optimization.

Sample Marketing Budget Breakdown

Remember how we said most marketing budget plans are out of balance? Typically, that means either branding or traffic activities are overshadowing the others. CRO activities are often seen as a one-shot process, resulting in a ‘set it and forget it’ attitude.

That’s a huge mistake.

Let’s look at how the numbers can work for you or against you.

In the example above, the budget split gave branding and traffic an equal stake in the campaign. CRO got the remainder.

The company invested $50K and created $200K in sales. That’s a healthy return, and they’re happy with the results.

What if the ecommerce VP decided to try boosting results for the next campaign by budgeting for a much-needed conversion rate optimization tune-up?

Let’s look at how that scenario could quite easily play out…

These numbers are typical of the results we see at The Good all the time. If anything, they are downplayed. Ecommerce managers are often mystified when they take a look at calculations on the potential returns from conversion rate optimization activities.

There is magic in the math. CRO can do more than double ROI – we often see companies double or triple (or more) what was already a pretty good return.

In the example above, the total budget for the campaign didn’t change. The allocation was adjusted, moving a portion from branding and traffic to the CRO column.

Because conversion rate optimization tactics serve to both increase the conversion rate AND the average order value, total sales and ROI more than doubled – even with HALF the traffic!

Marketing Budget Allocation Best Practices (With Examples) 

Let’s check out some marketing budget allocation best practices and results from real-life ecommerce brands. 

Test, optimize, and be flexible with your marketing budget

As with most business best practices, it’s important to stay flexible so you are always able to adapt to unforeseen circumstances. Form Nutrition CEO, Damian Soong, cites specific examples in the COVID-19 pandemic and iOS14 updates. 

“I think if COVID, and the iOS14 updates, have taught us anything it’s that we need to be flexible. To maintain this within a budgetary approach we tend to think of high-level strategic goals we must hit – eg total marketing spend of 20% revenue for example, but leave things quite fluid channel-wise within that.” 

The team at Form Nutrition, which offers quality vegan protein powder to consumers, uses a test and learn approach to their marketing budget to hit overall profitability goals but shift budgets based on what’s working or not. “For instance, if we see CPMs falling we can shift budget in that direction. Conversely, if a live event comes up we can pull budget from digital marketing and move it toward live.”

The team at Origin Meals has a similarly experimental mindset when it comes to their marketing budget allocation. 

Alan Harris, Vice President of Growth at the company that delivers locally-sourced sustainable meals, told us “Typically we are spending ~80% of our monthly budget on well-understood and measured marketing channels (currently PPC, organic social, email and content marketing) and giving 20% or more to experimental or seasonal opportunities.” 

This strategy has fared well for the team in the past, and continues to offer a growth opportunity without sacrificing what they know works. 

Alan added “The core 80% we allocate should be sufficient to keep pace with natural customer churn, while the remainder is how we test into new growth channels. That said, we are always opportunistic and aren’t afraid to expand our testing efforts if we think there is a reasonable chance of a strong ROI.” 

This is a smart way to approach your marketing budget allocation. Go in with tried and true methods, but leave room to flex your budget depending on where you see ROI – or opportunity for ROI. 

With a smart marketing budget, Snow Peak grew online revenue by 149%

Snow Peak sells premium quality outdoor lifestyle products. Like many ecommerce businesses, when we encountered the brand, they were spending a big chunk of their marketing budget on traffic acquisition, but they weren’t realizing a sufficient ROI on that spend.

Snow Peak needed an online overhaul to improve their average order value and conversion rate.

A more in-depth version of the marketing audit and sales funnel analysis we suggested above, this comprehensive work by our team of strategists uncovered the blockages and friction points preventing visitors from becoming paying Snow Peak customers. Implementing the successful test results resulted in: 

• The year-over-year sales revenue increased by 149 percent
• The average order value grew by 30 percent
• The visitor-to-buyer conversion rate grew by 108 percent

Snow Peak’s brand manager, Russell Borne, said “we saw a 30% increase in average order value, and that wasn’t throwing money into the black hole of digital advertising, but tweaking and honing in the site to be effective.”

You see, when you are smart about your marketing budget allocation and include CRO in the mix, you can see unbelievable results. 

Diversify your marketing budget

As the paid ad landscape changes, there has never been a better time to keep your marketing efforts diversified. With a few channels included in the branding column of your marketing budget, you not only reach a more varied audience, but you avoid one channel driving all your growth.

Lillie Sun at Three Ships chimed in with thoughts on the topic. In order from highest spend to lowest, “at Three Ships, we split our marketing spend mainly between paid ads, influencer budget, PR, email/SMS, and content sourcing.”

By including a variety of channels, the team can stay flexible about where to scale to maximize return on ad spend (ROAS). “For example, we were planning on scaling digital marketing spend for paid by an additional 20% for May but because we weren’t confident in our ROAS, we ended up not scaling as much. Only once we’re confident in the way something is scaling and we believe we have the process correct, that’s when we’ll really ramp up spend in that domain.”

With that in mind, Lillie shared an important caveat: don’t have one marketing channel drive all your growth. “I’ve spoken to brands who rely 100% on paid and when they pause ads, their daily sales will go from 10k a day to $300 a day.” Given the current landscape for paid advertising, this strategy is big miss. “It’s extremely important to diversify your marketing spend and have multiple channels going at once”

Tailor your marketing budget to your growth stage

Now, there is no secret that having more money has its advantages. But that doesn’t mean a small business or new brand can’t compete with larger brands. 

We checked in with Connor Gross of Respoke Collection, creator of custom car portraits and a newer brand in the ecommerce space, for insight on how their team approaches marketing budget allocation. 

“One thing we have to focus on as a new brand is immediate ROI. Unlike brands who have raised money, we are focused on becoming profitable from day 1.” Here you can see the importance of goal alignment in your marketing budget allocation process (which we covered at the very beginning of this article). Connor and his team know that their goal is to be profitable, early. “Which means we spend a lot of our budget on channels that deliver immediate ROI. The main one being Facebook advertising.” 

It won’t necessarily always be that way, “As we grow and are able to have excess cash, we will focus more on long-term ROI channels such as organic search and eventually brand plays in the automotive market in the future.” 

Regarding small business marketing budget allocation, Jon MacDonald, founder of The Good, discussed this at length with Ryan Garrow of Logical Position, on their podcast Drive & Convert. You can listen to the whole episode below, but I’ll also pull some highlights for you. 

• Leverage your flexibility: As a small business, there is less red tape to get things approved, and you can move more quickly into new markets than bigger brands can. Use this flexibility to your advantage in all aspects of your business, including marketing. 

• Focus on the details: You have the chance to pay attention to every detail, while larger brands have to focus on the macro numbers. You have less data to sift through, so you can catch areas for growth faster. Be aggressive when you see an opportunity. 

• Consider hiring expert marketing services: Quality help can go a long way. It is worth interviewing agencies or freelancers to manage a spend of as little as $1,000. You’ll pay for their expertise, but your dollar will go much further and can help you hit the target more quickly. 

• Be hyper-focused: As a general rule, anything less than $1,000 for marketing could likely be better spent elsewhere. But, if you have your heart set on paid advertising online or CRO, then make sure you find pockets where you can dominate or win. 

The most important thing to ask yourself as a small or new business is how can you achieve your goals and how can you find the time and the money to really make it work? 

Don’t Wait to Add CRO to Your Marketing Budget

As you can see, creating and implementing a marketing budget that drives results is not set it and forget it. You should be constantly analyzing and improving your budget allocation based on what strategies are exceeding your goals. 

This is similar to the marketing budget column we mentioned, Conversion Rate Optimization. And that’s what we can help you with. Our team of strategists does in-depth qualitative and quantitative research on your site and makes recommendations for improvement. We then test those recommendations before handing them off to you to implement. We generally see 9:1 return on investment for our services. 

Interested? Submit your website for a free landing page assessment and we’ll point out some of the areas you can improve to drive conversions today.

The post How To Effectively Manage Your Ecommerce Marketing Budget appeared first on The Good.

Are you about ready to give up on Google Ads altogether?

You’re not alone.

It’s easy to find people who hate Google in general and Google Ads in particular. Yet, the company continues to prosper.

Consider these stats:

• Google revenue has doubled over the past five years
• Google Ads brings in 95 percent or more of Google’s total revenue
• Digital advertisers invest more on Google Ads than any other advertising platform

When you think about it, there’s something perplexing about the situation: Why do so many digital marketing managers curse Google, when others are getting double or more back for every dollar they spend with Google?

Here’s an idea:

Let’s find out how to turn Google Ads performance around and make our ad spend spit out a healthy ROI.

So, why are my Google Ads not converting into sales?

Your website acts as a funnel and Google Ads work to fill that funnel. If your funnel is leaking like a sieve, you’re going to be wasting that traffic. Google Ads traffic that delivers a poor conversion rate gets expensive fast, and negative ROI on ad spend won’t be tolerated for long by any smart advertiser.

Digital marketing managers love to blame the SEM company for sluggish sales, but they may be pointing the finger in the wrong direction. SEM managers focus on click-through rate. They design ads aimed at generating traffic. If your ecommerce website is getting traffic, but not getting conversions, we’ve news for you:

That’s most often not the problem of the ad creator. It’s your problem. You have a user experience problem, not a Google Ads problem.

Here’s the good news:

You can fix that.

Why user experience is important to Google Ads conversions

The internet has given consumers more power than ever before. You can comparison shop between dozens of different websites and offers in hardly any time at all. It’s no longer necessary to drive from store to store, or wait for a trip to the city to find what you’re looking for. Ecommerce has revolutionized the way we shop. There was a time when we waited days or weeks or months to get what we want. Now, we’re hard-pressed to wait at all.

Think about it:

How many times have you clicked a link to visit a website, then given up quickly if it took more than a few seconds to load?

How often do you get frustrated trying to find what you’re looking for on a website, then give up and head to Amazon or another site that’s more familiar to you?

But what if…

You click to a site that loads quickly and is set up to allow you to find exactly what you’re looking for with minimum effort?

And what if…

You need a little extra information before making a purchase, but you don’t need to go search for it because the site you’re on provides a direct link to the info you need?

And not only that but…

Reviews from others who’ve purchased the product you’re considering are right there in front of you, all the specifications you need are provided for you, and there are ample high-quality photos from different angles so you can see exactly you need to see. There’s even a “Chat Now” feature you can use to get questions answered immediately by a customer service representative!

Do you purchase there, or keep looking?

(Remember, you’ve already given up on two or three other sites that were slow to load, difficult to navigate, or looked like they were designed by the lowest bidder.)

You don’t have to answer. We know exactly what you’re thinking.

We’ve been there too.

How to turn Google Ads not converting into sales

Let’s get right down to the nitty-gritty. Every visitor to your ecommerce website should get fast site speed, simple-to-operate navigation, a quick and easy checkout procedure, plus all the hand-holding you can supply.

Here are some of our tried and true tips for turning traffic into money. If you want more help, you can get it right here: The Good.

• Identify your best prospects carefully, then cater to their needs and desires
• Make sure the ad and the landing page work together to deliver the promise you made in your Google Ads copy
• Optimize every part of the user experience for your target audience and their characteristics – don’t stop at the landing page
• Activate a robust optimization plan
• Establish direct communication between your SEM and optimization teams, whether in-house or out-of-house (this is crucial)
• Test your navigation, category pages, product pages, checkout process, and integrate your marketing with high-relevance email campaigns
• Never stop testing, never stop learning, never stop improving

In a nutshell: find out exactly what your best prospects want, then go out of your way to help them get it.

Additional benefits to more Google Ads conversions

Once you have your user experience ducks in a row, you’ll not only see your conversions from Google Ads grow, you’ll realize upswings across other KPIs.

For example:

• Your ROAS from Google Ads will begin to make you smile
• You’ll get more conversions from your organic (non-paid) traffic
• You’ll get more conversions from traffic coming to you from social media
• You’ll notice increased engagement at every point of your path to sales
• Your brand will get talked about more – you’ll get more referral traffic

Remember the funnel that leaked like a sieve? Your work to fine-tune user engagement will plug those holes, keep way more traffic from bouncing, and convert those visitors in numbers higher than you’ve ever seen before.

All of that means:

• Better return on ad spend
• Lower customer acquisition cost
• Higher average order value
• Higher customer lifetime value
• And more

How do we know all of that?

We’ve seen it happen time and time and time again. For case studies and/or to speak with someone who can help you make your Google Ads campaigns purr like a Ferrari, contact The Good.

The post Google Ads Not Converting? Here’s Why appeared first on The Good.