Is CTR More Important Than ROI?
A lot of pay per click marketers place too much important on click-through rates. Yes, it’s true, click-throughs (CTR) are important and you want to measure your CTR, but at the end of the day what is really important is ROI.
Let’s assume that you spend $1 per click on a PPC campaign. In one day you get 10 clicks so you’ve spent $10. How many of those resulted in a sale? If you got no sales then you had no ROI. You’ve spent $10 and made no money.
But let’s suppose that you are paying $2 per click and you got the same number of clicks. Now you’ve spent $20; but suppose that one of those clicks resulted in the sale of a widget that resulted in a net profit of $22. Now you’ve got an ROI of $2.
That’s not much, I know, but it’s better than $0, right?
It’s great that you’ve got an ad that can draw clicks, but you have to look beyond your ad and see your landing page for what it is. If it isn’t converting your traffic then you’re just throwing good money after bad. We’ve discovered that sometimes a simple tweak of a landing page can result in more conversions.
Now imagine in that second scenario above that you got 2 conversions instead of 1. Your ROI moved from $2 to $24. Now imagine doing that every day. Isn’t ROI a lot more attractive then CTR now?
Rankings Vs. Conversions: Is Your Search Engine Marketing Working?
Many search engine marketers spend most of their time chasing the elusive search engine ranking, hoping that if they just SEO their website enough then it will magically appear in the No. 1 spot on Google for their target search term. Unfortunately, it rarely happens that way.
You can rank No. 1 for any search term if you work hard enough. But will you make any money from that ranking? Bottom line: If your web page does rank No. 1 for an important keyword or search term but doesn’t convert any visitors to traffic then you aren’t any better off than if your web page doesn’t rank anywhere at all. You’re still making no money.
Quite frankly, you’re better off with a Page 5 search result that converts at 50% than you are a No. 1 search result that converts at 0%.
You might want to read that sentence again.
Let’s put it into raw numbers. Let’s say your No. 1 search result delivers you 5,000 unique visitors per month but none of those visitors convert to customers. Either you’ve targeted the wrong keyword or your landing page isn’t written for conversions. That’s a problem.
On the other hand, let’s say your Page 5 search result sends you only 10 unique visitors per month but converts 50% of those visitors. Now you’re getting 5 new customers per month. Isn’t 5 better than 0?
Even if your No. 1 search result converts 1 percent of its traffic, 5 new customers from 5,000 visitors is nothing to get excited about. You’re still only converting 1% of your traffic, compared to 50% from the lower ranking page. It’s all in the numbers, man.
Instead of focusing on search results, you should be focusing on building landing pages that convert well. Optimize them for search traffic, sure. But if you are focused heavily on building links and optimizing for keywords and you forget to optimize for conversions then you’ve wasted a lot of time. And money.
What To Do Before You Start Your PPC Campaign
It’s good that you want to advertising with PPC. It’s an effective form of online marketing and advertisers who have tried it have come away with huge successes. But before you start your PPC campaign there is something very important you must do. Fail to do it and you will likely fail to earn any ROI from your advertising.
The most important thing to do to prepare for your PPC campaign is to ensure that your landing page is optimized and ready for conversions.
Optimization is important for obvious reasons. The optimization of your landing page must match the optimization of your PPC ad. When you sync your optimization well then you’ll have a higher quality score and a lower cost per click.
But even more important than optimization is conversion readiness. It doesn’t matter how well you optimize your landing page if you do make any sales. The conversions pay for the advertising and create your ROI. Without a conversion ready landing page there is no hope of success with your PPC campaign no matter how well written and optimize your ads are. Get your landing page ready for the close before you open your campaign.
SEM Leads To Sales
Search engine marketing (SEM) is a powerful method of making money. Unique to online marketing, it consists of more than building a website and watching them come. SEM involves testing, driving traffic, and closing sales by generating leads through pay per click advertising, search engine optimization, and paid inclusion forms of search engine marketing.
SEM is not new. Even before Google and pay per click advertising, online marketers were using search engines to build their businesses. But SEM has become more sophisticated. It is a science as much as an art.
At its most effective, SEM can build your business in a splash, but most businesses see their revenues climb steadily. The first step to effective SEM is to build a well optimized website with a good clean design and ready to convert traffic to sales. If your website isn’t ready to convert then it doesn’t matter how much traffic you drive to it. It will all be lost opportunities.
When it comes to SEM, the best place to start is with a plan. And if you have trouble coming up with a plan on your own, you might want to consider an SEM consultant.
Getting The Most Out Of Search Engine Marketing
You may feel your search engine marketing efforts are paying off and all is going well – they could be too. However, you should always be reviewing your activities to ensure you are get the most out of your campaigns.
Search Engine Journal has a timely post that provides seven tips to increasing your landing page conversions – we could all use an increase in conversions, even at the best of times. Consider reviewing the following in relation to your landing pages:
- Call to Actions Matter – is your call to action clear
- Digestible content – is your content scanable
- Minimize choice – don’t confuse things with too many choices
- Keep It SIMPLE – create simple pages
- Keep form length to a minimum – only collect the data you need
- Avoid marketing speak – use every day language
- Envoke Trust – if I trust your site, I will buy from you
Although very obvious areas to review, over time our pages get out of hand – reign them in and with luck, your conversions will start to climb. The post makes one point that is worth repeating:
Landing pages are becoming overly complicated data dumps where the short attention spanned consumer is left to sort through the pop-ups, multiple focus points, talking heads and flashing pictures. No wonder bounce rates are astronomical on most sights. Let’s stop blaming poor market conditions….
Now go back and look at your landing pages in relation to that description. How does it measure up? Many don’t measure up and by trimming them back you can make them lean, mean conversion machines.