4 Steps To Drop PPC Ad Spend AND Still Rake in the Leads
Feel like you are spending too much money on PPC and that you aren’t getting enough return?
It all starts with your website. Focus on improving your conversion rate.
Step One
Assess what your website’s current conversion rate is. The conversion rate is a measure of the percentage of 
traffic on your site that decides to contact you. Take the total number of conversions/leads that come through your website and divide that by the total number of visits to your site in the same time range. Your Google Analytics account will be a major tool in helping you collect this data.
There are many factors that contribute to conversion rate. A few may include:
- General design and user experience
- Website loading speed
- Competitors in your market
- Cost of your products or services
- Your industry
- The length of your customers purchase and decision making process
There will likely be MANY more unknown and unique factors that could affect your websites conversion performance. As experts in the industry, we see website conversion rates all across the board. There is no standard, good, bad or ugly. Simply put, the higher the percentage of traffic that converts, the better.
Step Two
Sit down and evaluate what your site is built to do. Ask yourself, what do I want out of my website? Do you want visitors to sign up for your software demo? Do you want them to download your white paper? Do you want them to sign up for an email list so you can market to them later?
Once you have figured out the WHAT, then work on the HOW. Craft your website’s user experience to funnel your web traffic into taking the actions you want them to take. Utilize the best on-site real estate for effective 
Calls-To-Action (CTAs), or mousetraps that better engage your website’s visitors to take action on your site. Promote your demos tactfully; ensure you have a contact phone number above the fold and that it’s easy to read. Make your number clickable on mobile devices. Get creative here, there’s a lot of unique opportunities you can utilize for your site.
Step Three
Ensure you have all conversion opportunities on your website tracked. Track any time someone fills out a form on your website such as a Contact Us form using Google Analytics Goals. Track any time someone picks up the phone and dials you directly with Call Tracking. Create a promotional campaign so that you can track any business that is compelled by your digital efforts to get in their car and come to your storefront.
Step Four
Test, test, test. There’s a lot of buzz in the industry around A/B testing. Many people think this to be a waste of time, but you would be surprised by the results we have seen simply by changing the color or the text of a button. Test different elements on your site, and stick with what works.
Results
We implement these four steps with our clients, and we have seen incredible results.
Below is real time data trending of one of our clients PPC performance over the last year, before and after completing our increased conversion rate tactics. In October of 2013, we were spending more, and getting less; our cost/conversion was wildly high and we realized that something needed to be done. So we set out on a journey to improve our client’s conversion rate, and boy did it work. One year later we were getting close to 3X the leads at 1/3rd of the cost per lead and our client couldn’t be happier. The data speaks for itself.
Moral of the story is, you can throw as much money at PPC as you want, but if your website isn’t effectively converting traffic, it won’t be a successful investment and there is no scalability. Remember, these changes will not only improve PPC conversion rates, it will bring in more leads across all referral sources from organic, to direct, to any other sites that refer traffic to your website.
