What To Measure When Your PPC Efforts Don't Convert.

Lets face facts… Not every click is going to convert into a sale or lead in your PPC Account. Brand awareness is going to almost always be your primary goal. With brand awareness come sales/leads over time. However, the majority of your visits are going to always be people looking for information on a product or service. So… what do we measure  to determine the effectiveness of our campaigns when they don’t convert? Here is a short list of things to add to your “to do” list.

1. Check Your Bounce Rates: Your Bounce Rate tells you how many people simply came to your site and left without exploring any further than the page that they landed on. Keywords with high bounce rates tell us that people aren’t finding the information they are looking for. So either you should get rid of that keyword or develop a new landing page that gives your visitors more information on that product or service so that they would be more inclined to convert.
2. Check Your Time On Site Data: Reviewing your Time On Site data can give you insight into how your visitors view your landing page. For instance if you Time on Site is low chances are that your content is less engaging and could use some help. However if your Bounce Rate is high and you have a higher Time on Site it could just mean that people are either shopping around or that your offer didn’t meet their requirements. In this case you might consider adjusting your offer.
3. Review Your CTR: CTR can help you determine the quality of the traffic that you are receiving. If you’re not getting the performance that you initially expected your CTR can help you find out if certain keywords are having a negative impact on your overall campaign performance. In these cases you should think about either getting rid of the said keyword or break it out into a separate campaign so that the negative
   CTR doesn’t effect the historical data that your good keywords are getting.
4. Ad Performance: The overall performance of your ads can help you determine if you need to test out another ad variation. In most cases we would look at the conversions of our ad variation to determine their success, but even if you are getting conversions we can see what is attracting people and whats not by referring to your ad variations CTR. This can help us better understand what people are expecting and at this point it may be a good idea to either test a new ad or change up your landing page.

These are just a few things to think about when you have no or low conversions. Even when your campaigns are performing well these few tips are still good to keep in mind.

Written By: Ed Cehi – PPC