There is a common mistake made by Meta advertisers related to conversion rate and an attempt to scale ads. You can be better. Let’s make sure that you don’t make the same mistake.
Maybe this is you. There’s a temptation to try to outsmart the algorithm. But it’s unlikely to work…
Conversion Rate and Opportunity
Like any good marketer, you pay attention to your website metrics with Google Analytics. You are always looking for ways to optimize and improve performance. How can you leverage this information?
You notice that you have a 10-percent conversion rate on a particular product landing page. It’s the perfect combination of a good product, offer, and purchase flow.
You want to improve revenue. One way to do that would be to improve traffic to this high-performing product page.
The Mistake
You come up with an idea. You feel super smart and can’t believe you hadn’t thought of it before.
You know how to drive traffic with Facebook ads. You can do it very cheaply. This is the perfect way to scale.
If you send 100 people, you can expect 10 to convert. If you send 1,000 people, 100 will convert. What about a million?
This can all work because you did such a great job with your product landing page. All you need to do is send the traffic. The landing page will do the rest.
So, you set up a campaign with the primary goal of sending the most traffic possible at the lowest cost. You run a Traffic campaign that is optimized for Link Clicks or Landing Page Views.
Now, you sit back and wait for the profit to roll in…
The Results
That campaign sends a ton of traffic. And yet, no conversions. Nothing.
You wait a while longer. You spend $100. Then $1,000. You’ve sent thousands of people to that amazing product landing page. You might get a sale or two, but that’s it.
Something is wrong. People are clicking on your ad, so they are clearly interested in your product. But virtually no one is buying.
What happened to that amazing conversion rate? What was once 10 percent is now well under 1 percent. You went into this excited about the prospects of big profits and you’ve actually lost money.
You are angry with Meta. There’s no reason that this should happen. It doesn’t make sense.
What Went Wrong?
It’s simple, really: You tried to outsmart the algorithm.
You made assumptions, and that is never a good idea. You assumed that the traffic that appears in Google Analytics is the same as the traffic that you could send with a Facebook ad optimized for clicks.
You assumed that if people clicked your ad, they must be interested in your product. And since the landing page is effective, a predictable percentage of that traffic should result in sales.
But that’s not what happens when you optimize for Link Clicks or Landing Page Views. You’ve learned an important lesson: Not all clicks are created equal.
It’s quite possible that the 10 percent conversion rate reflects organic traffic. The people who made their way to this landing page did so on their own. Your links, emails, and marketing messages helped. But it wasn’t algorithmic.
Meta’s ad algorithm had only one concern when you created your ad set optimized for Link Clicks or Landing Page Views: Get Link Clicks or Landing Page Views at the lowest cost.
Nothing else. No concern about what those people do after landing on your website. It doesn’t matter.
So, the algorithm will find advantages — even weaknesses — in the system to find you cheap clicks. It could be people who just click everything. It could be accidental clicks due to the placement. It might even be click fraud that hasn’t yet been flagged by the system.
But that traffic will not be nearly as good as what you normally get.
What You Should Do
Don’t overcomplicate this. If you want to increase purchases with your ads, run a Sales campaign that is optimized for purchases.
The reason is simple: The algorithm will distribute your ads and make adjustments to delivery based on how well you achieve that goal.
If you optimize for Link Clicks or Landing Page Views, the algorithm will focus on that. If you optimize for Purchases, the algorithm won’t be happy unless you’re getting sales.
Of course, you’re going to see that surface-level metrics may look nicer when optimizing for the click. You’ll get sky-high Click-Through Rates and lowest-of-the-low Cost Per Clicks. You will need to spend more to get clicks when optimizing for conversions, and that can be misleading.
You need to remember that the 10 percent Conversion Rate (or whatever that rate may be) is not in a vacuum. That rate will not hold, regardless of the traffic that you send. It would be nice, of course, but that’s not reality.
If you are unable to optimize for a Purchase, work your way back through the funnel from there. Try Initiate Checkout, Add to Cart, or even a custom event for a Quality Visitor. But the last resort should be be Link Clicks or Landing Page Views.
Even then, you’re likely burning money.
Watch Video
I recorded a video about this, too. Watch it below…
https://www.sydneysocialmediaservices.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/conversion-rate-mistakes-300x157-1.png157300exposurehttps://www.sydneysocialmediaservices.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/sydney-social-media-services-white.pngexposure2023-03-07 06:59:062023-03-07 06:59:06Do Not Make This Mistake with Conversion Rate and Meta Ads
You probably know that improving your content conversion rate is one of the best ways to grow your business with digital marketing. Now you just need to figure out how you can increase your content conversion rate.
Luckily, our experts know a lot about high-quality content and are sure the right content marketing strategy is the key to success. An effective strategy optimized for conversion is guaranteed to not only increase your business’s content conversion rate, but also gain more traffic, prospects, loyal customers and sales revenue.
Quick Takeaways
81% of marketing experts view content as a core business strategy
There are several types of conversion, such as traffic, prospects, leads, registration and purchases
Average conversion rates for B2B companies typically fall between 0.5-1%
51% of businesses that invest in content marketing post content everyday
Demonstrating your company’s expertise via content creation is key to increasing your content conversion rate
Establishing an effective content marketing strategy and optimizing your content for conversions is the best way to increase your content conversion rate.
What Is A Content Conversion Rate?
Did you know that 81% of marketing experts view content as a core business strategy? This makes content creation one of the most common techniques for increasing a company’s revenue.
To measure the effectiveness of a company’s content, marketers use content conversion rates. These rates represent the percentage of converted users among the total number of visitors to your content page.
Businesses with high content conversion rates are likely to have an effective content marketing strategy, whereas low rates indicate room for improvement. Average conversion rates for B2B companies typically fall between 0.5-1%.
Image Source: Oberlo
Wondering what your business’s content conversion rate is? Find it by using the formula below.
Image Source: TextBroker
If your content conversion rate is lower than you’d hoped, there’s no need to panic. Raising your conversion rate is simple – but first, it’s important to understand the different types of customer actions that are considered conversions.
Types of Conversion
Contrary to popular belief, conversions are more than sales revenue. Conversions happen when site visitors complete one of many desired goals that lead to becoming a paying customer. Some of the most common types of conversions include:
Traffic. Increasing the quality of your site traffic through advertising, SEO and high-quality content is likely to raise your conversion rate.
Prospects.Site visitors interested in your company’s products and services are likely to turn into prospective customers.
Leads. When prospects share their contact information, they become leads. Whether they want a free download or register for your newsletter, leads are more likely to become customers.
Registration.Good site structure and clearly defined content encourage prospects to sign up for a personal account with your company.
Purchase. Once a purchase is made, prospects and leads become paying customers. This both increases your sales revenue and conversion rate.
When your content successfully leads to one of the aspects above, it has effectively increased your business’s content conversion rate.
Why Is Your Content Conversion Rate Important?
Optimizing your content conversion rate is important because it allows you to gain more value from visitors and users already interested in your business.
A healthy content conversion rate is so important that 51% of businesses investing in content marketing post content everyday. Not only will consistent content increase revenue per site visitor, but also gain more customers and enhance the overall growth of your business.
When it comes to conversion rates, there’s always room for improvement. Even the most successful companies are always trying to improve their sites to grow their business. Luckily, there are several simple ways to optimize your content that will help improve your content conversion rate, too.
How To Improve Your Content Conversion Rate
With original, engaging content, you can inspire your audience to take action towards making a purchase, ultimately improving your content conversion rate. Here are the most effective ways to enhance your content and encourage conversions.
Use Attention-Grabbing Headlines
Having an immediate impact on readers is critical to grabbing their attention. According to the graph below, using numbers, addressing the reader directly and including “how to” in headlines are the three most effective ways to intrigue your readers.
Image Source: Moz
Keep in mind that your headline represents the main point of your content. That means it needs to be clear and straightforward in order to let the reader know what they’re going to learn about. By using numbers and “how to” terminology, you can grab your reader’s attention, add value and encourage conversions.
To learn more about the importance of attention-grabbing headlines, enjoy the short video below.
Video Source: Khattak
Know Your Audience
Knowing your audience is key to creating content that converts. The purpose of content is to engage and motivate readers, and doing so is much easier when you know which problems your audience needs to solve.
To improve your content conversion rate, create and share content that addresses your audience’s:
Needs
Wants and desires
Knowledge of your products and services
Instead of focusing on selling your product, prioritize providing a solution. By educating your audience and offering a practical solution to their problems, you’re likely to increase your company’s content conversion rate.
Optimize High-Performing Blog Posts
Blogging is so valuable that 53% of marketers prioritize posting consistently. Optimizing your blog page can strengthen your company by increasing site traffic, building customer relationships and encouraging engagement.
To optimize your blog content, start by identifying which of your posts have seen the highest levels of web traffic. Then, drive more traffic to these posts by sharing on social media, sending in email newsletters, or updating as needed. By driving more quality traffic to posts that have performed well, you can ensure that new visitors will be likely to convert.
Write Strong Calls To Action
Increasing your conversion rate means writing powerful and compelling CTAs, or calls to action. Whether you’re asking your audience to complete a survey or make a purchase, being clear, concise and intentional in inspiring readers to take action is key. You should also:
Be direct and straightforward
Use action verbs
Motivate your audience
Prioritize persuasive, powerful messaging
Lastly, consider the placement of your CTAs. They should appear above page-folds, along the side of your landing pages or at the bottom of blog posts.
Demonstrate Expertise
Demonstrate your business’s value and expertise to build confidence in your readers and encourage them to convert. By completing the actions below, you can establish your company’s credibility and build confidence in your audience.
Share original research. Sharing facts and figures related to your industry will educate your audience and strengthen your reader’s understanding of your company.
Include how to use products and services. Sharing how-to information related to your products and services positions your company as an expert and builds trust.
Show trends in your offering. Including trends related to your company will build confidence among your audience and show them how your product will enable them to participate.
Cite other authorities. Including statistics, data and citations from well-known industry players positions your company as an expert and encourages readers to trust your content.
When you integrate these aspects into your content creation consistently, both the value of your content and content conversion rate will increase.
Raise Your Content Conversion Rate Today
Raising your content conversion rate is one of the best ways to start gaining loyal customers and generating more sales revenue. There are many different ways to optimize your content to support your marketing efforts.
No time to create more content? No problem. Content marketing experts can help you create content optimized to increase your conversion rate. Start building your optimized content portfolio by checking out our weekly blog content service today, or schedule a free consultation now!
The post How To Improve Your Content Conversion Rate appeared first on Marketing Insider Group.
https://www.sydneysocialmediaservices.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/content-conversion-rate5.png540960exposurehttps://www.sydneysocialmediaservices.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/sydney-social-media-services-white.pngexposure2023-02-20 22:40:242023-02-20 22:40:24How To Improve Your Content Conversion Rate
Conversion rate optimization is more important than you might think for your overall bottom dollar. I mean after all, the whole point of marketing is to get prospects to convert to paying customers.
But how can you ensure what you’re doing is the best it can be – especially with the digital marketing landscape always changing and evolving? Answer: a conversion rate optimization audit!
Thegood.com says:
With conversion audits, you force yourself to step outside of the jar and see your customer’s purchasing experience for what it truly is, not what you’ve been hoping to create over the last few months or years.
An audit is a deep look at your conversion rate optimization that enables you to pick it apart and put it back together to make it the best it can be. Asking qualitative and quantitative questions will provide you with answers that can boost your website’s efficiency in converting prospects to clients.
New to conversion rate optimization? Here’s an informative video to help you out from Neil Patel:
Quick Takeaways:
Conversion rate is the ultimate metric when evaluating your overall return on investment (ROI)
Auditing your efforts and figuring out where your strengths and weaknesses are will help you build a better website overall
Setting an effective call to action (CTA) is the perfect ending to your content and can dramatically increase your conversion rate
But how do you know when it’s the right time to perform a CRO audit? Setting deadlines based on overall conversion progress is a good way to start. For example, you might not audit until you’ve hit 500 website conversions or a certain number of impressions.
These goals are different for every business, so decide what success looks like to you before scheduling your conversion rate optimization audit.
Source: Marketing Charts
The basics of conversion rates
Views are great, but what happens after the initial click? Is the reader just leafing through your website? Are they sharing it? Are they actually purchasing your product and scheduling your services, or are they just browsing?
Conversion rate shows how many prospects are becoming customers. This metric is the real shining gem of your content marketing efforts! Converting prospects should be your top priority with content marketing.
Oftentimes the places where you are producing and publishing media give you excellent analytics tools to help assess what ads or content is producing the best conversion rate.
Get the easy stuff out of the way first
Go onto your website and click around. You don’t have to have a real purpose other than making sure everything is working like it should. Little bugs make a lot of difference in user experience online, and finding them to send to your IT department can clean up your website pretty dramatically.
Hotjar.com includes a fantastic list on the bugs and general formatting things to look for:
An attention-grabbing headline
A clear value proposition
High-quality images
Liberal use of white space
Social proof through testimonials, case studies, and user-generated content on social media
Easy ways to get in touch with you either via live chat or a contact form
Clear, consistent CTAs
You know when you click on someone’s link or page and there’s a broken link or empty page? How unprofessional does that look? CRO audits are a chance to go in and track down those mistakes to maximize your overall conversion rates.
Look deeper at your pages that convert the most
Ok, this is a bit of a loaded statement. Yes, you want to dive deep on the articles and pages that harvest the most conversions, but you also need to take care of the pages viewers will see the most.
Things like your landing page and contact page may seem trivial, but first and last impressions make a world of difference in the online user experience. We commonly refer to these pages as top of the funnel and bottom of the funnel.
Source: Visual Paradigm Online
Ask your visitors what they think
Who doesn’t like to be asked what’s on their mind? Communicating with your audience is an important step in identifying their interests and concerns relevant to your product or service.
What communities are your company invested in online – more importantly, where is your online voice? If you don’t have one, you aren’t controlling the market narrative and you definitely don’t have an easy access to their thoughts and ideas.
By improving your virtual presence, you are also maintaining an outlet to have your written content on your prospects’ screens.
You can’t forget the most obvious way of listening to your clients comments and concerns! Surveys! Sending out surveys via email blast and your social channels is a great way of getting directly to the people that use your website the most.
If you really want results, you should sweeten the pot with a discount or freebie upon completion. This enables both parties to walk away satisfied, as you get the data for a more enriching experience, and they get money back on their next purchase.
Love efficiency? You can double this up as a prospect and client audit too. Asking for general information like demographics and psychographics is a good way to get your marketing and sales departments a little extra data to work with.
Plus, it’s a great time for qualitative research. Take the time to read the comments you get from surveys. Some might not be great, but being able to read exactly what your clients and prospects are thinking about is a gift. Even with a small sample size, it’s important to keep your finger on the pulse of your audience.
Check your mobile optimization
This seems like an obvious one, but when was the last time you opened your website on your phone? Mobile viewability is not only necessary but a must have when publishing content. More than half of all content is viewed on a phone.
If your website isn’t optimized for it, you’re only making yourself look bad! This is one of those things that is perfectly acceptable to hire contractors or consultancies for. This includes things like videos on your website being optimized for mobile and making sure your site doesn’t run slow on a phone.
It should go without saying that this doesn’t mean you should neglect your traditional online website in favor of mobile. There should be a balance between the two, and both should have the same content and presentation with appropriate formatting.
A/B Testing
A/B testing is one of the easiest ways of identifying what changes you can make to your website to turn more of your visitors into customers.
An A/B test involves pitting two slightly different versions of a webpage against each other – for example, version A might have green CTAs, while version B might have red CTAs.
You’ll then send 50% of your visitors to version A, and 50% to version B.
Before long, you should be able to identify which version of the page results in more conversions.
Source: Pitstop Media Inc
Whichever version performs best “wins.” At that point, you might make the winner a permanent fixture on the page or perform another test to find out if another variation on the page could perform even better.
Formstack changed just three words from their main menu – “Why Use Us” became “How It Works” – and saw a 47.7% increase in clicks.
Consider your organic search ranking status
Getting views on the content you publish for your website isn’t exactly the easiest thing to accomplish. It’s really easy to throw money at paid advertising to bolster your impressions on your content marketing efforts, even if it does hurt to see that much of your marketing budget disappear.
When conducting your CRO audit, consider which content that’s having trouble converting needs to be optimized. Content optimization inadvertently leads to conversion rate optimization down the line, as organic search is crucial to converting prospects into customers.
Organic search is for the prospects you haven’t made contact with yet. When they’re searching for general terms related to your product or service, it’s your aim to be one of the very first things they see on the page. What can you do to optimize your content, and your SEO results?
Make sure all of your blog and written content is following these important rules:
Keep your word count between 1000 – 1800 words
Google likes articles within this range. Too little or too many might keep your hard work from ranking where it should!
Know your keywords
SEO/SEM is most successful when you know what words are the most important to what you talk about. Back to our tech example, words like tech, wearable, watch, would likely contribute best to a higher ranking among similar articles.
Have a compelling meta description
The hook is everything, right? Having a good description under your article title will be the blurb prospects read. If it’s boring or irrelevant to them, why would they click on your article?
Internal Links
Internal links are hyperlinks in your blog content that link to other pages within your domain. You should include 1-2 internal links in every blog post.
Call to Action (CTA)
CTAs tell readers what their next step is for interacting with your brand, and they can increase conversion rates by 121%. CTAs are the get up and do this part of your article, and are crucial to getting shares and engagement from your readers.
Content optimization IS conversion rate optimization! Overhauling all of your content should be saved for another time, but this is something to make note of now while you’re doing an in-depth dive for future change.
Put your next CRO audit on the calendar NOW
Discuss with your team about what your next set of benchmarks to hit for your next audit are now! Oftentimes we can easily forget about optimizing and reviewing different parts of our website. This cannot be the case with something as important to your overall efforts as conversion rate optimization.
When setting your new benchmarks, consider thinking ahead with questions like what kind of numbers are we expecting after this current audit or should we be shooting hire than we were? Be prepared and remember what data you were trying to improve the first time around.
This will help you stay on track to building up your next big audit.
Wrap up
Yes, a conversion rate optimization audit takes a significant amount of time and care. But it isn’t without good reason, as making sure you’re maximizing your content’s ability to convert is crucial to your brand’s overall bottom dollar.
By thinking critically and asking for opinions, you can have a better understanding of where your user experience is thriving and where it is falling short. Keep your mind open and really listen to what people have to say about your website.
Now that you know what you’re looking for, it’s time to get to work and start your conversion rate optimization audit!
Do you want to use some of the marketing strategies seen here on MIG’s site but need some help or advice? Marketing Insider Group has a team of 35+ experienced writers ready to produce content for YOUR business. Check out our weekly blog content service or schedule a free consultation today!
The post The Do-It-Yourself Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) Audit appeared first on Marketing Insider Group.
