5 Killer AdWords Tips for Converting Clicks

Choose the Right Landing Page to Give Your Customers What they Came For

Far too often I see businesses using their home page as a landing page for a targeted ad. Unless your home page deals directly with the query then this is a bad idea. You don’t want customers clicking on your ad only to then have to dig 3 levels deep into your site to find the information they were looking for – more often than not they’ll click
Think about which page on your site you want your customers to land on and make that the target URL.

Usually this would be a product page, make it as targeted as possible. If somebody is searching for ‘blue aviator sunglasses’ then take them to the exact page that sells blue aviator sunglasses. Not your clothing store homepage, not the accessories category or even the sunglass category.on somebody else instead.

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The quicker it takes to convert someone the more likely they are to convert.

Enable Sitelinks to Give Your Customers Choice

Enabling sitelinks means that below your ad (with your targeting landing page), Google will display a set of high level links to other pages on your site. This is especially good for broad campaigns where potential customers may be looking for many different functions from your site.
Similar to the landing page, by enabling sitelinks you are getting your customers to where they want to be a lot quicker, increasing the chances of them converting.

Google provides a good guide to enabling sitelinks which includes an example of a pizza store’s sitelinks. In this case it gives the customer four options – ‘Order Online Now’, ‘Store Locator’, ‘Deals in Your Area’ and ‘Returning Customer? Order Here’. A customer searching for ‘Brighton Pizza’ might want any of those links and so this gives them a range of options for entering the site and takes them exactly where they want to be, saving them time in the process. A regular customer won’t want to go through the new customer options every time, so the ‘returning customer’ link is the best.

Use Reviews to Gain Trust

When choosing between two suppliers, one of the most important factors after cost is customer reviews. In choosing between competing ads, customers are easily swayed by the site with an average 4.9 rating from 12,000 customers over the site with none.

Like sitelinks, this is an extension for your ads, and does require you to be signed up to Google Product Search.  Google pulls reviews from all over the web so this is an aggregate score that can’t be manipulated easily.

Geotarget the Right Customers

This may seems obvious but again it is commonly overlooked. If you provide a location based service (if you’re a local shop or only deliver to certain areas) then it is vital that you target people in your area.

An independent clothing store in Brighton isn’t going to get much business by targeting customers in Tokyo. There are two benefits to geotargeting – you are more likely to get clicks and those clicks are more likely to turn into sales.

Think Strategy, Not Brute Force

My final tip is about when to draw the line when it comes to bidding wars for the top spot. Do not let a bidding war consume all your time and budget for one big keyword. Let your competitors fight it out for the top spot and spend more time and less money creating an amazing ad at 3rd spot. Your higher clicks will soon put you at number 1 but you’ll be paying a lot less than everyone else.

You should also look at other narrower keywords. See if you can find a range of keywords that together will provide more clicks than just that 1 really competitive query. Chances are that it will be cheaper to get to number 1 for all of them than number 1 for just that one broad match keyword.

Let your competitors slug it out, be clever and reap the rewards.