Testing Your Way to a 3% Conversion Rate

Be more than average, okay?

[justablink]

Real Life Scenario: Highly competitive industry, low rankings in SERPS due to new site, paid search fumbling around at 1%, and weak call to actions in ad copy and landing pages. One month of testing different ad copy, always trying to beat my prior best, or, beat my “control” ad. I cannot stress enough that you should be constantly testing ad copy. The theme here is always beat your best performing ad.

What is a highly competitive industry? Over 70 advertisers on G alone

What was done?
Step 1: Created a sale with a save story. A save story, from my old retail days, is how much off. In this case, 15% off save story.

Step 2: Reviewed current ad copy and click-throughs. Recreated one new ad, including a sense of urgency message in the ad (sale ends Monday) and posted the same ad to every campaign running, keeping the existing landing pages intact. Hint: make sure your campaigns are set to A/B test your ads, so select Rotate: “Show ads more evenly” on your campaign settings.

Step 3: Average position for all campaign keywords was roughly nine. Doubled the maximum CPC from $0.28 to $0.56 to increase average position. Hint: I never use even numbers like $0.40 or $0.50.

Step 4: From Step 1, I posted the sale to every page on the site. This way, the natural traffic would also see the sale that is running.

Step 5. The prior month was always used to test and optimize the feed to Froogle (now known as Google Product Search). Again, testing different feeds allowed our products to rank higher, and show in the “one box” results.

Step 6. Launch the Adwords campaign on a Wednesday (Thursday and Friday were typical slow conversion days, as well as the weekend). The sense of urgency message created above was the sale ending on Monday.

Result
Monday, the day of the sale, we hit a 3.61% conversion rate. The following day, continued at 3.23%. For the week average, 3.07%. I’m continuing the sale, needless to say. But I am still tweaking my ad copy, and trying to beat my prior click-through rate and conversion rate.

Final note: Continued testing of your ad copy, your call to action on your landing pages, and your offer should improve your results. Good luck!
justablink

[nubbin]

Thanks for your post...very useful.

Did you make the discount available to all customers visiting your site regardless of whether they came via the adwords ad? Did you require the customer to enter a discount code at checkout to get the saving or did you just automatically deduct the discount off all orders?

Cheers