Google Ads campaigns are now one of the best ways to drive traffic and conversions to your website. But it would be too simple to think that a well-planned campaign structure and well-chosen keyword targeting are enough for a business to reach its goals. Paid search campaigns usually lead to a website, which acts as an online storefront and, in many cases, the first interaction potential customers have with your business. That makes it necessary for your website to be set up to perform well. This is where CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization) comes in, since it improves how well your website turns visitors into customers.
In this article, our campaign manager, Camille, shares some tips for making your website as campaign friendly as possible.
1. What is CRO?
CRO, or Conversion Rate Optimization, is the practice of studying how users behave on your website. The goal is to understand what pushes a user to take action on your site, and what holds them back. Either way, the aim is to give users the best possible browsing experience to boost the odds that they convert.
An intuitive, user-friendly browsing experience encourages visitors to stay engaged and explore more of your website. Carefully chosen calls to action will nudge them toward converting. On the other hand, other things on the page, whether too intrusive or simply unappealing, can turn them off and send them elsewhere.
2. The impact of CRO on campaign performance
Setting up a well-designed paid search campaign is not enough to make conversions show up like magic on your website. Sometimes, even a carefully built ad campaign does not perform as well as expected and falls short of what you were hoping for. A bug on your site, such as a 404 error or a slow loading time, can drive traffic from your campaigns away before visitors even take the action you wanted.
On top of that, a poor landing page experience directly affects the campaign’s quality score. Our ads will not rank well with the algorithm if the landing page does not match what the ad promises. For instance, if someone searches “buy a swimsuit”, one of our main keywords, and Google shows our ad, the landing page needs to actually be about selling swimsuits.
In some cases, even when everything looks appealing about your campaigns and your website, conversions stay low. The data we have does not always tell us, with full certainty, why the conversion rate is falling short. This is the moment when, as an advertiser, you need to take time to study how your users browse. And this is where CRO comes in.
A study by Jakob Nielsen, a user experience (UX) expert, shows that simplifying a website makes it easier for people to use. For example, giving visual cues (navigation icons, social media links, language options, and so on), cutting out unnecessary steps, or shortening a form are things worth looking at when trying to improve how a website is navigated.
This might seem obvious to some, but when users find a website too complicated or struggle to find information, the share of people who leave the site goes up a lot. So you need to find the right balance, giving your audience useful, on-topic content along with smooth, well-built navigation that gets a clear message across and sticks.
3. How can CRO boost your conversions?
As you can probably tell by now, a strong ad that sends people to a poorly built website can undo all the work put into paid search. Here are 4 things worth working on your website before launching digital marketing campaigns, to get the most out of them and increase conversions on your site.
Fine-tune your calls to action
Call-to-action buttons, or CTAs, need to be clear and easy to spot on your website. This clickable button can lead to a phone call, an email, a newsletter sign-up, or another page on the site with a form to fill out. The goal is for it to stand out from the rest of the content, both in its wording (a short phrase or a single word) and its design. CTAs push users to act and, ideally, to convert. Feel free to use the same CTAs in your ad titles and descriptions as on your website, to build a consistent user journey.
Improve the design
Website design covers a lot of ground and plays a big part in improving CRO. If your ad campaigns bring traffic to the site but users leave right away, it’s worth asking why. A close look at your website can reveal the obstacles standing between a user and converting. Users need to understand at a glance how to get around the site. For example, you can simplify the navigation menu, cut down on the number of tabs, or make the site responsive, meaning it adapts to any screen size: mobile, tablet, or desktop. The better your site follows good UX practices, the better your odds of turning users into customers.
Study user behavior
With Google Analytics, you can get a detailed look at how visitors behave. For example, you can see how many clicks a page gets or spot the blog post that drove the most conversions. More precise tools, such as Microsoft Clarity or Hotjar, let us dig deeper into the details. Heatmaps, among other things, highlight the most active areas of a site. Session recordings, through Zoho, are also very useful for tracking how users move their mouse. User behavior can also be studied through eye tracking, a sensor-based technology that follows where a user looks and what draws their attention in real time as they browse a site.
Test, test, and test again
To improve CRO quickly and well, running repeated A/B tests while tweaking certain variables matters a great deal. For paid search campaigns, this might mean testing which final URL works best, trying different CTAs, or working the same keywords into your ad titles and descriptions that also appear on your website, so they line up more closely with what users are searching for. By running these tests, advertisers can get more out of their search campaigns and turn more users into customers.
4. Final Thoughts
A great paid search campaign cannot make up for a poorly built website. Even with the best search ads, a website that isn’t smooth and easy to use won’t get users to act, and that can hurt your return on investment. So CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization) is something that can meaningfully raise both your ads’ quality score and your website’s conversion rate, and in turn, the results of your paid search campaigns. Experience shows that the best way to gauge how well your CRO is working is through qualitative usability testing, such as UX interviews, or by running repeated tests on your campaigns based on what your analytics data tells you.
