Nowadays, there is no shortage of blogs or articles on the internet that will tell you how to drive traffic to your website. You can choose to invest in online advertising, SEO hacks, influencer marketing, brand building, or one of the other hundreds of traffic generation strategies out there.

However, getting traffic isn’t the end game in the world of digital marketing. There is still a need to serve content that will get those visitors to engage and convert. For anyone who does business online knows that the most critical metric is sales conversion.

In this post, I’m going to go through some of the most common mistakes that marketers make when running a Google Ad campaign of their own. We will investigate why most ad campaigns tend to fail and what can be done to fix a campaign that isn’t bringing you any results.

Firstly, you should put your ad campaign under a microscope to see if it is truly on point and then make sure you’re on top of the following:

Relevancy Matters

• Learn to balance your buyer type: by relying heavily on broad match types, you can get lots of traffic, but it will be unqualified, and less likely to convert.
• Keep an eye out for irrelevant search queries and add them to your campaign as negative keywords. This will help target more relevant traffic.
• Overusing your ad extensions can boost your click rate, but conversions are more important so turn off the extensions if there is no significant return in conversions.

Targeting

• Location, location, location! You want to be sure that your ads are being shown to the right people. Otherwise, you’ll just be getting vanity clicks which are useless to your bottom line.
• Timing is of crucial importance - people may be interacting with your ads at a certain time of day, but not all have an intention of following through. By running a click performance report, you can determine the best time to run your ads.
• Bid high on long-tail keywords and set them as an exact match. This will attract more targeted traffic, bringing in users who are further along the customer journey.
• Think devices - your ads may be under performing on a certain device. Try bidding low in these instances and invest more of your budget on the devices that are generating better results.

Analyse

• Enable conversion tracking as its imperative that Google Ads data is being synced with your Google Analytics goals data.
• Consider your business objectives and align your campaign accordingly. For example, if you seek more brand awareness, try video ads to see a surge in engagement.
• Lastly, check for click fraud as it may be possible that your clicks are fraudulent, and therefore invalid.

These points are just some of the things you should be considering, but conversion rate optimisation (CRO) is a massive area and there are a great many things you should consider to try to improve your conversion rate. So, don’t hesitate to try new things to improve your business’s CRO because small things such as even moving a ‘Buy Now’ button higher up the page or adding a contact number to your header can make a massive difference!

Let me know in the comment section below, if you have any questions or thoughts on turning clicks into conversions.