Chasing the right audience can lift your conversion rate by up to 300% (Source: Marketing Experiments).
It’s the start of the conversion process that gets people from “that looks interesting” to “here’s my money”.
It’s not all about ranking.
One of the biggest tricks we see people fall for is chasing ranking over conversion.
(If you have enough money, it’s easy to get to the top of any search result.)
And it’s easy to see why. The latest figures from InsideSales indicate 35-50% of sales go to the vendor who responds first.
We believe the purpose of digital marketing is to get more people buying more of what you’re selling.
Increasing your profit by helping you charge more for it. Or reducing the cost of a sale. Preferably both.
Which is why we pay careful attention to getting the right traffic to your site. Especially when you consider only 25% of leads are legitimate and should advance to sales. (Source: Gleanster Research). It’s easier to convert an interested market than it is to keep a disinterested audience engaged.
A quick example.
Consider a weight loss program available online.
Promoting “weight loss” will get you all sorts of traffic, from people looking for medical intervention to market researchers looking for imagery for a study.
Targeting “weight loss online program” gets you less traffic, but a significantly higher number of people you can sell your program to.
If you’re finding a lot of people are finding you, but not clicking through, or worse, not staying on your site, consider these questions.
• Have you changed your keywords lately?
• Are you still working to outdated budget expectations?
• Are you using the right words?
• Are you spending too much on converting traffic to leads?
• Are you talking to the wrong people?
Have you changed your keywords lately?
Are last year’s search words still getting the same amount of traffic? The same amount of the same sort of traffic? Or have you noticed a change in your traffic? Is your market changing?
Given the speed of change in the market, no one marketing online can set and forget their search terms.
If you’re running a campaign that depends on relevant keywords for traffic, make sure you’re testing your words against traffic numbers. As a rule, we recommend quarterly checks for clients, but these can be more or less frequent depending on your market and your needs.
Are you still working to outdated budget expectations?
The more people open eCommerce sites online, and the rise of programmatic and automated technologies, the more competitive the search market becomes – and the more people are paying for specific keywords on adwords.
Cost Per Click is rising.
With more businesses recognising the value of specific keywords, and more businesses spending more resources to determine the effectiveness of their advertising, the cost per click has more than doubled for many keywords (Source: SearchEngineLand).
The same study shows many ranking values have increased by a multiple of 7 and, for google adwords the Cost Per Click has tripled.
More effective words are usually more expensive. But, not always. There are creative ways around the issue. (In England, the search term “market” for insurance businesses had risen to five pounds per click. But the search term “meerkat” was available for five pence per click. So Compare The Market created a campaign about meerkats and it was so successful it went global.) Which goes to show, the effective words don’t have to be expensive.
We recommend talking to an experienced digital consultant who can help you determine which search terms will be most effective for you, at the right price.
We also recommend running a competitor audit to determine which of your competitors are using which words – which a good digital agency will be able to source for you through their media contacts.
Are you using the right words?
The right words get the most traffic. Discovering if you are using the right words through customer research, user research and campaign analytics – doing multivariate and AB testing to continually hone-in on the best words for your buck.
A handy trick is to track your conversions. Google Ads has a free conversion tracker which helps you determine what visitors are doing and what actions they’re taking once they start interacting with your site.
Are you spending too much on converting traffic to leads?
You’ve got the traffic you need, but you’re either spending too much getting them to your site, or getting them to your site and losing them once they get there.
A good site audit and a conversion rate tracker will help you identify where you’re losing potential customers once they land on your site.
Programmatic and performance marketing data, properly analysed, will be able to tell you if you’re spending more than you need to be on the terms you’re focusing on.
A recent study by AdobeTM suggests top ranking, successful companies spend around 5% of their marketing budget on optimisation. Money well spent, when you understand almost 80% of marketing leads never convert into sales. Lack of lead nurturing is the common cause of this poor performance. (Source: MarketingSherpa)
Shout for the right traffic.
If you want proven, effective solutions to your challenges, talk to an agency that provides digital marketing services in Australia, and has 10 years of industry-leading experience in the field. Call Shout today.
