Boost your conversion rate by 45% today… no, really!
searchengineland.com | November 10, 2016
The goal of any good marketing campaign is conversions — or better yet, sales.
Yes, key performance indicators (KPIs) like rankings and traffic can help you figure out whether or not your campaigns are on track, but if your marketing doesn’t lead to action (a conversion), it isn’t doing your business a whole lot of good.
Obviously, the more conversions you can squeeze out of your traffic, the better, which is why conversion rate optimization (CRO) has become such a hot topic in digital marketing.
But what if I told you that you could increase your conversion rate by 45 percent… today?
Odds are, you’d probably think I was full of it. And, to be honest, you’d be partially right. Most companies can’t produce those sorts of conversion rate increases overnight. That being said, most marketers really can improve their apparent conversion rates by 45 percent in just one day.
Here’s how.
Looking at conversion tracking
If you want to boost your conversion rates, you need to track all of your conversions. This seems obvious, right? After all, if you don’t know how many conversions you were getting, how will you know whether or not your new results are better?
The only problem is, most marketers aren’t tracking all their conversions. In fact, a significant number aren’t tracking any conversions.
As a result, these businesses are marketing blind (or at least with severe cataracts).
For example, let’s look (okay, you got me, pun intended) at some data Disruptive Advertising has put together on AdWords conversion tracking.
Tracking conversions in AdWords
In my opinion, AdWords is one of the best advertising mediums for tracking conversions.
First of all, paid search is usually pretty low-funnel advertising: people are looking for something, they do a search for it, see your ad, they click on it and (hopefully) convert. That makes attributing conversions fairly straightforward.
Second, Google offers a range of easy-to-implement conversion tracking options, ranging from reporting form completions to offline sales.
The combination of these two elements makes AdWords an ideal platform for high-quality conversion tracking. So, odds are, if you’re not tracking all your conversion actions in AdWords, you probably aren’t tracking them on your other marketing channels, either.
After auditing more than 2,000 AdWords accounts, we discovered that only 58 percent of AdWords accounts track conversions.
The remaining 42 percent of advertisers can’t tell if their campaigns are working.
But here’s the thing: of that 58 percent of advertisers who were tracking conversions, about half were only tracking a portion of their conversion actions.
For example, if you’re a plumber, most of your leads don’t fill out a form — they call.
However, your typical plumbing company doesn’t track calls, it tracks form submissions. And when that company goes to optimize their campaigns, they end up optimizing for the least important conversions!
This problem isn’t limited to plumbers, either. I’ve seen countless AdWords accounts with hundreds of thousands of clicks and only a few conversions.
Now, technically, those companies fall into the “58 percent of AdWords advertisers track conversions” statistic I just mentioned, but their “conversion tracking” doesn’t tell them much about their campaigns.
So, if we only look at businesses that actually have effective conversion rate tracking in place, that leaves us with a mere 29 percent of AdWords advertisers.
The other 71 percent have no real idea how their campaigns are performing.
How inadequate tracking affects your apparent conversion rate
Now, all of that is well and good, but the idea that most marketers aren’t effectively tracking campaign performance is hardly breaking news.
The real question is, how many conversions are they missing out on?
Makes sense, right? The majority of AdWords accounts convert zero to five percent of their traffic.
But there’s a problem: this data is skewed.
Remember how only 29 percent of AdWords accounts are effectively tracking conversions? Well, the preceding graph shows conversion rates for all advertisers in our study that were tracking any sort of conversions. They were tracking some conversions, but because they weren’t tracking all of their conversions, their conversion rates are artificially low.
Oops.
To be fair, though, we aren’t the only ones to have made this mistake. WordStream ran a similar analysis a couple of years back and found that the average AdWords account had a conversion rate of 2.35 percent (our average conversion rate was 2.18 percent).
The lowest-performing 25 percent of accounts converted just zero to one percent of their traffic (we had the same results). The highest-performing 25 percent had conversion rates of 5.31 percent or more (5.34 percent in our study).
Makes sense. Same study, same results.
But what happens if you do what WordStream couldn’t and only look at conversion rates from the 29 percent of AdWords accounts that we knew from our audit process were effectively tracking conversions?