Adwertix PPC

HANDWRITTEN TYPE SELLS BETTER MACHINE TYPE

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Fonts can influence the perception of buyers - writes about this marketing publication Ariyh. This conclusion was reached as a result of laboratory and online experiments. Experts have found out how fonts on packaging affect customer engagement and satisfaction. According to the researchers, the mechanism works the same everywhere: that is, it is also relevant when designing advertisements or product cards on websites, as well as when creating application designs.

The researchers concluded that the use of handwritten fonts has a positive effect on sales. This is especially true for the so-called hedonic products - these include food, scented candles, as well as products from the categories "Fashion" and "Impressions". Such inscriptions are perceived more naturally and cause a positive emotional reaction. For example, chocolate with a handwritten font is more likely to be bought when compared to machine type - 17.2% versus 3.4%.

But with functional goods, everything is different. These include, for example, mosquito repellent or building materials. Experts have found that typeface is associated with reliability and economy, as well as professionalism.

PPC & CRO SYNERGY: 6 TIPS FOR SUCCESS

You should be leveraging insights from paid search activity to improve your CRO strategy. Here are six areas where you can start.

Paid search advertising (PPC) and conversion rate optimization (CRO) are both great for boosting business performance in their own right.
Going a step further and combining their insights, however, can make them greater than the sum of their parts.
By sharing your findings between the two to combine paid search and CRO into one strategy, you can drive the very best results.

While they may be separate digital marketing activities, there is considerable overlap in implementation.
Both incorporate extensive data analysis, analyzing past account performance to make predictions going forward. They also rely on testing – trialing out changes and using the successes to incrementally boost your KPIs.
Most importantly, PPC and CRO both work primarily towards the same aim: conversions. That might be calling your call center, filling in a web form, or buying the product you’re selling.
Combining these two digital marketing powerhouses together you can really help supercharge your conversion rate.

The Power of CRO👊💪

If you aren’t already doing CRO, you really should be.
It aims to decrease “friction” along the customer journey by making landing pages more user-friendly and relevant.
By making the path to conversion more appealing, CRO is one of the most powerful tools for boosting digital marketing performance. One client at my agency saw a 47% uplift in conversions from the introduction of a CRO strategy alone.

It’s well known that CRO improves your PPC performance. This is because an increase in conversion rate lowers your cost per acquisition (CPA).
Put another way, if your costs remain the same but you win more conversions, you increase your efficiency of spend.
If you use CRO to make your landing pages more relevant to your search ads, you will also raise your Google Ads Quality Score.
This, in turn, lowers cost per click (CPCs) and increases spend efficiency – you would get the same number of clicks at a cheaper price tag.

The Power of PPC💪👊

If you know how to properly apply your PPC insights, this relationship can work the other way around, too.
Paid search data revolves around who your customers are and what they’re looking for, so you should absolutely be using this information to tailor their experience on your website.

Not sure where to start?
Here are my top five tips for feeding your PPC insights into your CRO strategy.

1. Quality Score

You should start by using Quality Score (QS) information in Google Ads to decide where to focus your CRO efforts.
QS depends on a few key factors: expected click-through rate (CTR), the relevance of your keyword to its ad group, and the landing page experience.
The final one is key here. Not only can you see a Quality Score column in Google Ads, you can also add Landing Page Experience as a metric.
This is Google’s measure of how useful and relevant the landing page at the ad’s final URL is to those who click on it.
Look for keywords with high click volume but low Quality Score; their Landing Page Experience ratings are likely to be low, too. This is because these keywords already have optimized ad relevance, but their landing page quality or relevance is lacking.

On this information alone, you know that their landing pages need improving.
It isn’t going to tell you what to change, but it will tell you which pages need to be improved so you know where you should prioritize your CRO testing and optimization.

2. Keywords

As search queries trigger ads through keyword matching, your keywords are a great indicator of customer intent.
By cross-referencing keywords with the landing page the final URL sends the user to, you can find further room for website improvement.
This requires evaluation of how far the landing page matches the expectation of the search query that triggered their keywords.
For example, if someone searches “buy red shoes” and comes through your exact match keyword, it would be most logical to send them to a page that lists only red shoes.

A page displaying shoes of all colors is going to make it more difficult for the user to find what they’re really looking for.
This page would likely impact your conversion rate due to drop off: instead of sifting through irrelevant search results, the user might opt to look elsewhere.
To make these pages more relevant to your keyword, you’ll need to test copy and page changes.
Start by trialing keywords in the page copy to make the landing page more relevant, or consider having final URLs directing to pages pre-filtered for relevant products, as below.
The more specific the keywords, the more filters you can test to see their impact on conversions.
Bear in mind: you might not want to filter according to your customer’s demographic characteristics.

Demographic information can be very helpful.
However, for some verticals (such as retail), users are not always searching with themselves in mind.
Sending male customers who search for “buy red shoes” to a page pre-filtered for men’s red shoes, for example, would make that landing page less relevant to men buying women’s or children’s shoes.
Other assumptions such as size or price could also limit conversion rate.

3. Ad Copy

It’s well known in marketing that consistent messaging is key to building user trust.

Your keywords should feature in your ad copy for consistency with search queries.
Ideally, you’d also have those keywords and/or other elements of your ad copy featuring on your page.
This might include aligning your Search ads with dynamic page headlines, or repeating calls to action again on your site.
If you have recently changed ad copy based on A/B testing insights, it could also impact your conversion performance.
Test out these different avenues for improvement.

4. Demographics

Although demographic characteristics don’t always predict user intent, they can still inform tailored landing pages.
Google Ads has a wealth of valuable data on how different demographics perform towards your KPIs.
This is especially true if you are using Smart Bidding – Google’s machine learning algorithms are sophisticated enough to comprehensively understand which user characteristics predict high intent to click and convert.

Just as you can use demographic data for targeting in Google Ads, you can also leverage this information to create personalized landing page experiences for:
🔸High-performing user demographics.
🔸Or groups whose behavior you’d like to modify.
The most obvious examples are age and gender.
If the 18-24 demographic has a high CTR but tends not to convert, you could test advertising discounts or sale products on a personalized landing page for this demographic segment.
You might find that prices were putting them off, or you could discover that regardless of discount deals they don’t convert as the products themselves aren’t of interest.

This will give you further insights to feed back into your PPC strategy. Similar logic would apply if this performance pattern were true for one gender and not for another.
You can also use your Google Ads in-market and affinity audiences in Google’s Optimize.
If you sell hotel packages, for example, you could test personalizing landing pages for people in-market for a budget holiday.
This might mean placing ‘featured’ budget deals at the top of the page, or sending them to a landing page pre-sorted in ascending price order.

5. Device

Another dataset to examine is device segmentation: how does your conversion performance vary by device?
Historically desktop performed better, often due to smaller data packages with phone contracts, slower mobile internet, and poorly optimized mobile sites.
These days, however, the majority of Google searches come from mobile devices. Mobile should, therefore, be prioritized not only in your Google Ads activity, but also for your website.

This is especially true for retailers, as mobile and tablet users outspend shoppers on desktop. A poorly built or optimized mobile site is basically money down the drain.
If you have lots of users coming through mobile but very few conversions, start testing to determine how your site is functioning on phones.
Perhaps your buttons are too small when rendered on mobile leaving, your website too awkward for a smaller screen?
Or maybe your site loads slowly on 3G connections as you’ve failed to compress images and CSS?
Combining your Google Ads device data with the contextual information you have about typical customer journeys will enable you to devise the most complete and effective testing plan.

6. Locations

Google Ads performance can vary heavily by location.
You’ll want to pay special attention to location variations when devising your CRO strategy if you’re a business with both online and offline conversions.

Consider testing variable ads and landing pages based on the location of the user clicking the ad.
If the user is near a store, you can highlight in-store deals or delivery options like free “click and collect”.
If your user is further away, test highlighting delivery speed, any free delivery offers, and online-only deals.

Better Together🤝

PPC insights bring valuable data about your visitors; the keywords they come through, which devices they’re using, where they’re located – the list goes on.
These characteristics give us context for why users behave as they do when interacting with your site.
Using this data to tailor their experience on your site will enable you to devise the most informed CRO strategy, improving conversion journeys for site visitors who come through paid search.

As this relationship is reciprocal, investing the time and effort to apply your PPC data will drive continued growth.
At this time of year especially, incremental increases in conversion rate can translate to a huge revenue boost, while a lack of personalization caters to nobody.

HOW TO DEVELOP YOUR PPC STRATEGY

A successful PPC campaign begins with a goal-oriented strategy. Learn five of the most common PPC goals and what you can do to accomplish each one.

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A successful PPC campaign begins with a strategy.

You need to know and clearly define what you want to accomplish.

What is your goal?

A PPC or paid social program can actually consist of many different goals.

Sometimes your PPC goals will be obvious, but sometimes this will require more consideration of all of the options available to your organization.

The most common PPC goals include:

🔸Brand awareness
🔸Product and brand consideration
🔸Leads
🔸Sales
🔸Repeat sales

Each of these goals aligns with the basic sales funnel: awareness, consideration, and purchase.

As an advertiser, you should closely examine the sales funnel for your business and customize your paid media programs accordingly.

For example, a B2B business may have a much longer sales cycle due to researching business solutions and the internal decision-makers’ involvement.

In contrast, a consumer ecommerce product could be an immediate purchase or a few hours from clicking on a PPC ad.

Let’s take a look at each of these five PPC goals and tactics that will help you accomplish each one..

Brand Awareness🗣

PPC is often used for brand awareness to introduce and raise the visibility of a brand or product.

At this phase, we want to maximize exposure to a highly relevant audience, with hopes clicks will lead to the consideration phase.

Using PPC display ads can be effective if the targeting is on-topic by using keywords, topics, relevant placements, in-market lists, or a combination of those.

These targeting tactics are the most general but will offer a wider reach.

Social media PPC ads are a good option for branding since there are so many targeting options based on demographics and interests.

Similarly, search campaigns with more general keywords can be useful for branding.

For example, if the business sells scuba equipment, potentially bidding on “scuba gear” could increase awareness of the product offering.

The downside of this approach is that you will often see higher cost-per-clicks due to competition and sometimes irrelevant click-throughs.

The best way to execute this approach is with smart keyword match types and negative keywords.

Product & Brand Consideration👥

In this phase, when users are considering and researching a purchase, it is a great time to reintroduce the brand with more detailed targeting and more persuasive call-to-action language in the ad copy.

When consumers hit the considerations phase, typically, their search queries will become more detailed and specific.

They may search for brands and product combinations to research, compare, and read reviews such as ‘Samsung 50” TV’ or ‘LG 50” tv’.

This is a good time to use remarketing with a banner or responsive ads to bring the consumer back to the previously viewed product.

Another excellent form of targeting is the in-market list composed of users whose online behavior and action have indicated they are in the market to buy.

Leads ⚙

When your business model doesn’t support immediate or online sales, you want to collect leads to follow up with interested prospects and engage them in a conversation.

Calls-to-action might be:

🔸Request a demo.
🔸Get a consultation.
🔸Free trial.

All of these ideas are meant to entice the user to call or fill out an online web form to initiate conversions.

How the lead is followed-up on will vary for each business, but now you also have information that can be used for PPC and paid social customer match campaigns.

Sales 🛒

Consumers who are ready to purchase tend to use words in their search queries that indicate higher intent. This can include things like:

🔸Model numbers.
🔸Shipping information.
🔸Discounts.
🔸Coupons.
🔸Financing.

It is good to have separate campaigns that address this phase by highlighting offers, guarantees, warranty information, or your return policy.

This reassures consumers that your business is the one to buy from.

Make full use of your ad copy and ad extensions.

Also, try cart abandonment ads and remarketing ads that show the products the user viewed.

Remember to set up the remarketing campaigns so that customers are no longer targeted after the purchase.

To do this, set up a “purchasers” list. Exclude that list from the campaign. You will also need it later for repeat sales.

Repeat Sales 🛍

PPC is an excellent way to garner repeat sales if your product or service needs replacement, maintenance, accessories, upgrades, or other product cross-sells or up-sells.

In designing the repeat sales approach, ask a few questions:

🔸How long does the product last or need to be replaced?
🔸Is there a new and improved model coming out?
🔸Does the consumer buy multiples?
🔸Are there opportunities to cross-sell accessories or complementary products?
🔸What would motivate the consumer to re-purchase from you? 🔸Brand loyalty? Fast shipping? Unique features?

Use PPC remarketing and customer match to re-engage previous customers with messaging aimed at factors that would motivate them to purchase from you again.

Similar to the sales phase, coupons and discounts are always good motivators.

Conclusion

A solid PPC and paid social account should include numerous goals designed to reach and lead the consumer down the sales funnel to purchase.

It might be helpful to outline this in a chart that contains goals, keywords themes, key messaging, and landing pages to get organized and ensure all of the bases are covered.

After launch, review the results and determine how to optimize and allot budgets.

Check the “Attribution” section of the paid media platform or analytics to see campaign paths and assisted conversions to help guide moving forward with a successful account.