Blog Post

3 Reasons Why Investing in CRO Can Improve Your PPC Performance

by: Power Digital April 28, 2018

Table of Contents

The purpose of running a PPC campaign is to capture searchers online and offer them a solution to what they’re looking for. Whether you’re selling a product or offering a service, paid search marketing has proven to be a viable channel for companies to drive more business online. However, each year as more companies run PPC and put more budget towards this marketing channel, the advertising space becomes more competitive. How can advertisers beat out the competition and continue to drive people to convert? We recommend focusing your efforts on CRO.

So how does CRO help the performance of your PPC campaigns? We all know that the first step to capture users online is to have enticing ad copy that will catch their attention and get them to click on the ad. By following ad copy best practices, advertisers can reach the right users at the right time. The second step is to drive them to a conversion-rate-optimized landing page after they click on the ad. This is so that once a user clicks through, there is a clear conversion path on the landing page to guide people to convert.

While having enticing ad copy can help improve your click-through-rate, having a conversion-rate-optimized landing page can help improve your overall conversion rate.

You can write the most compelling ad copy and draw users to click on your ad, but what good does your ad do if you’re driving users to a bad landing page and people don’t convert? If your landing page isn’t optimized, there’s a high chance people will drop off during the conversion funnel and not even make it to the final step to convert. Considering the ultimate goal of running PPC advertising is to drive people to convert, it’s important to start investing in CRO to ensure your landing page is optimized for conversions.

Although there are some websites that need CRO more than others, almost all websites can benefit from CRO testing. How do you know if your website needs CRO? A big tell-tale sign is when your ads are yielding a high click-through-rate (above 2% according to PPC Hero) but the conversion rate is low (below 2.70% according to Search Engine Watch). Seeing this trend in your metrics will typically indicate that your ads are appealing to the users and people are clicking through to the landing page, but for some reason once they are on the site, they are not converting. This is when CRO can be helpful in identifying where and why people are dropping off so you can modify your landing pages accordingly.

Related: Is Your Site Optimized for Conversion?

In order to setup CRO testing, we utilize VWO, an all-in-one CRO software. By implementing a tracking pixel, VWO can track every user behavior on your site. You can capture data insights such as heatmaps, click maps, area stats, etc. and understand how people are interacting with your page. There are numerous elements on your page that can be tested, by looking at your user’s’ behavior data will help you make data-driven decisions on which elements to test.

Let’s say your ads are yielding a high click-through-rate and a high conversions rate, why would you still want to invest in CRO? Here are 3 reasons why:

Drive More Conversions And Increase Overall Online Revenue

Even if your campaigns are already performing well, there is always room for improvement. “The perfect website or landing page does not exist – but you can get close to perfect if you are continuously testing and optimizing using the proper CRO tools”, says our Director of Web Development.

VWO can run analysis on your product pages or lead gen forms, and provide insights on the checkout or form completion process to help you make the user experience as seamless as possible. CRO is a continual process of optimization as how people interact with your site can change week over week depending on who’s visiting your site. This is why it’s important to make sure that your site is catering to your most current users. Ongoing CRO testing can ensure your site is always optimized and drive more conversions for your business.

People Often Interchange Between Devices While Searching And Browsing

Considering most people own multiple devices nowadays, they could be searching on one or all of their devices at any given time. Cross-device browsing has made CRO even more crucial in online marketing as people tend to interact with each device differently. What works on desktop won’t necessary work on mobile and vice versa, this is why it’s important to approach each device with its own strategy.

Considering there’s been an uptick in mobile-first users in the recent years, it’s important to keep mobile-first testing in mind if majority of your users are on mobile. I can’t stress enough how crucial it is to implement separate testing strategies dedicated to each device in order to optimize accordingly.

Ability To Use Dynamic Text Replacement On Your Landing Page

Unbounce offers advertisers the option to show the exact text in your ad copy on your landing page with Dynamic Text Replacement. This is similar to AdWords’ Dynamic Keyword Insertion which dynamically updates your ad to include a keyword that matches the user’s search query. Having the ability to customize your landing page to your ad and then customize that ad to the user’s search query, you can now serve extremely relevant ads to people with a landing page that reflects the same ad copy. This relevancy tactic can be used to help improve your ad’s quality score and ultimately help you drive more conversions.

The bottom line is CRO can help you create landing pages that are optimized for conversions. By continually testing, you can make sure that your page is always conversion driven. As the PPC advertising landscape continues to get more competitive, it’s important to always be looking for new opportunities to improve your website or landing page that you’re driving your users to. CRO can help both e-commerce and lead gen businesses as well as companies with more engagement-focused objectives to better improve the overall site user experience. If you are still not convinced, here are 9 CRO Facts That Will Convince You To Use It. Time for you to start investing in CRO!