There are many ways to successfully increase conversion rates on your website, but first, let’s actually talk about conversions. What they are and how your site can benefit from correctly applying this?

What is a conversion rate?

A conversion rate is the percentage of the number of potential customers to a website who perform your desired ‘call to action‘. Examples of successful conversions could be anything from getting a visitor to get a free quote, signing up to a newsletter, or even purchasing a product.

For paid advertising, the most important thing to remember when trying to increase conversions on any website, is that there are many aspects that come together to make a successful conversion campaign.

Make use of the different types of ad extensions

You can expand upon your existing ad copy and use ad extensions to really target your audience.

Ad extensions you can use to increase conversion rates include, but are not limited to;

Structured snippets
Call extensions
Location extensions
Price extensions
Promotion extensions

Update negative keywords

You can waste a lot of time and money if you don’t clean out your keywords regularly. Make sure you remove negative keywords from the search terms to ensure your ads aren’t showing up for irrelevant results.

Fine tuning your keywords means you are more likely to appear in front of the right customer, which in turn leads to a better conversion rate.

Using a relevant landing page

There’s no point having a well-crafted and focused ad, only to have it take the user to a generic webpage. A lot of PPC users often make the mistake of sending ad traffic to their homepage, regardless of what the ad copy was advertising.

If you want to increase conversion rates, make sure you have a dedicated landing page for your ad. If you are targeting ads for ‘red shoes with high heels in size 5.5’, send them to a page that only features that product. If you don’t have one – create one!

Ensure path to conversion is simple to navigate

Generally speaking, internet users have short attention spans and can be quite lazy. Don’t make it hard for them to get where they want to be.

If you want them to complete a form, don’t make it bigger than it needs to be. Only include fields for the information you need in order for the conversion to complete.

If you want really want additional data later, you can always encourage them with email marketing or a survey instead.

Add reviews on site and in Google Ads

There is one major factor in play when it comes to whether or not people will convert – trust. If they don’t trust you, they won’t part with their time or money, no matter how good your ad copy is.

The best way to build trust for your business is with reviews. Users are more likely to trust a business or website if other people give it good reviews.

Start laying the groundwork early – every time someone purchases from you, or uses your services, ask them for a review. Building this up over time will show other pptential customers that you can be trusted with their money.

And don’t delete bad reviews! This is a rookie mistake that many websites make but it can be detrimental. Having 100 5 star reviews will often ring alarm bells with users as it looks too good to be true, whereas having 80 five star, 18 four star reviews and a couple of three star reviews looks more realistic.

You should also try and reply to every review, even the bad ones. It shows you are engaged and active when it comes to helping your customers.

Test different ad copy

A great way to see what’s going wrong and to help increase the conversion of this is to run an A/B split testing test. This involves creating two versions of your ad. You might try changing the title, keywords, ad extensions, or landing pages – though try not to change too much at once or you won’t know which change worked.

Spending a little time and budget doing Split Testing early on sometimes makes the difference in making a sale or not, and if done correctly, you won’t need to spend time and money in the future trying to correct these issues.