When it comes to your website, there are plenty of actions that could be counted as a conversion such as submission of a lead capture form, clicking an email address or completing a purchase. Taking certain steps before and during your digital marketing campaigns can increase the likelihood that your ads will lead to a conversion and give you a higher return on your investment. And since measuring ROI helps justify your spend, optimizing your campaigns and website to maximize conversions is critical.
Setting Your Campaigns Up For Success
When building your campaigns, it’s important to know how you’ll be able to measure conversions. If you’re using a platform like Google Analytics to track website visits, you might already be recording conversion events. While this is an important step in the process it will typically only show last-touch attribution, meaning only the last known traffic source is shown as causing the conversion. While this is helpful, a conversion is likely to happen because of multiple touchpoints.
- Various online ad platforms like Facebook, Google Ads, Linkedin, Tiktok and Reddit all have their own pixels which can be added and provide additional attribution to those ad types. Each platform has its own nuances, such as varied lookback windows (the time between when an ad is viewed or clicked and when the conversion happens) and the ability to assign conversion values (higher values should be given to more important actions).
- It’s also important to tag any clickable links with UTM parameters. Manually assigning a Source, Medium and Campaign using Google’s Campaign Builder will allow you to monitor what is happening on your website in Google Analytics after someone clicks an ad. Any actions taken on the website like pageviews or key events will be attributed to the UTM parameters from your campaign.
Additionally you can see qualitative metrics like Engagement Rate and Average Session Duration, both of which can easily be described as “the higher the better”. If GA4 shows an Engagement Rate of 2% that means only 2% of your sessions are longer than 10 seconds, contain more than 1 page viewed or contain a conversion action. These high-level metrics can be a good indicator of whether your digital marketing tactics are working are not, but they aren’t the only thing to monitor.
Optimizing Within Ad Platforms
In addition to checking high level Google Analytics metrics to see what has room for improvement, you should be monitoring your ad campaigns from within their respective platforms to see how they perform outside your website. For example:
- Email Marketing: Check your emails platform for metrics like Open and Unsubscribe Rates
- Social Media Marketing: Check Meta for metrics like Likes, Shares and Comments
- Paid Search: Check Google Ads for metrics like Click Thru Rate and Search Impression Share.
All of these are indicators of awareness and engagement that happen before someone even gets to your website.
- Low off-site engagement with your digital advertising can be an indicator that the creative or copy isn’t resonating with the target audience.
- You might also be targeting the wrong audiences entirely or showing ads with messaging that gets lost or ignored.
Before you can start optimizing your campaigns towards higher Conversion Rates it’s important to know what you have the ability to change within the campaign settings. This will vary significantly platform by platform, but typically includes a Who, What, Where, When breakdown of performance.
- Audience Targeting – Who is seeing your ads?
- Creative Strategy – What ad is being served?
- Geographic Targeting – Where in the world are your ads being seen?
- Content Targeting – Where on the internet are your ads being seen?
- Ad Schedule – When are your ads being served?
Breaking down performance by these parameters can give you a better idea of when ads are being clicked more often, liked more often or receive more conversions. One of the easiest means of optimizing your campaign is allocating more budget towards the breakdowns that have better metrics.
- Audiences – Optimize your current and future targeting towards behaviorally interested groups that have higher conversion rates and higher conversion values. In campaigns where audience targeting is available, you should update your audiences on an ongoing basis in order to reach new users.
- Creative Strategy – Compare creative sizes, messaging and imagery to see which are driving conversions. Stop running creative that has with low or no conversions so more media budget is allocated to the ads that do convert and leverage those learnings in your next campaign.
- Geographic Targeting – While certain products cannot be granularly targeted, such as financial services by ZIP code, you can still confirm that ads are being served accurately in the targeted geographic area. Double check in GA4 that your Sessions aren’t arriving from Cities, States and even Countries outside your targeted area. In addition to checking that, some platforms allow you to increase or decrease bids based on geography which lets you be more aggressive in areas where Conversions are higher.
- Content Targeting – Where your ads are seen matters a lot, and if you’re optimizing towards Conversions, then a high number of Impressions doesn’t matter if they can’t be tied back to user engagement. This means checking your social ads for the different places where ads display to ensure a large portion of your budget isn’t being allocated to social placements with low to no Conversions. You can also check where your Programmatic Ads are running and exclude any domains with high Impressions but low to no Conversions. This is where the conversion pixel lookback window matters the most, because higher funnel ad units might not result in any Conversion Attribution for a week or longer.
- Ad Schedule – One option that many ad platforms have is the choice of when your digital ads are seen. By default many will serve your ads 24/7, with many being served overnight or at times when users are generally less engaged. Just like buying TV and radio broadcast advertising you should schedule your digital ads to run in Primetime. This will vary by product but ZAG – who tends to work primarily in the financial services marketing space – has typically observed higher conversions in the afternoon and earlier in the week.
Optimizing Your Landing Pages for Conversion
A lot of work can go towards making sure your campaigns are optimized for conversions before a user even gets to your website, but once they click, you’ll want to ensure that your landing page experience is similarly optimized.
- Landing Page Alignment – Ensure that your digital marketing efforts click to a highly relevant landing page to reduce the number of clicks in the user journey. The page text and imagery should align with they’ve already seen in the ad copy to create a seamless and relevant experience.
- Calls to Action – Give your visitors clear direction on what they should do to take action on the landing page. This includes highly visible, action-oriented links (e.g., Apply Now, Get Pre-Approved in 5 Minutes) that take them into the purchase funnel or to a relevant contact form. Users shouldn’t have to scroll to find this information.
- Information without Overkill – Some visitors are still going to be doing their research and will need convincing before they convert, while others are more direct and only need a slight nudge in the right direction. We recommend summarizing the best qualities of your products or services towards the top of the landing page to help push those quick converters through the door, with more descriptive blocks of copy lower on the page for those who need more convincing. It never hurts to add a call-to-action at the bottom of the page as well.
- Minimal Clutter – When someone gets to your landing page you want them focused on that specific offer and nothing else. While you can’t completely stop them from clicking to an unrelated page you can lower the likelihood by using landing page templates that remove website navigation links that can distract from conversion actions.
Letting Your Optimizations Prove Their Worth
Digital advertising isn’t about setting it up and letting it yield results. You should be checking on campaign performance on an ongoing basis, at least 2-3 times per week. However you don’t want to make major optimizations too often, as most ad platforms have a learning period where their algorithm takes time to get acclimated to the changes. While you can make manual changes to the targeting, the ad platform will make its own changes based on machine learning with the manual adjustments as a guide. After any major campaign change you should hold off on making additional major changes for at least 2 weeks. However, if you observe a sharp drop in traffic it’s reasonable to assume your changes should be rolled back and reevaluated.
Whether you’re running your first digital ad campaign or your hundred-and-first, ZAG can help by auditing your strategy and making recommendations based on our years of best practices. We can also help fully plan, schedule and optimize your next digital ad campaign.
