I’m sure you’ll agree that sounds awesome, you pay just £99 and a PPC Management Agency manages your pay per click account for you. We’ve seen other agencies offer ppc management for this super low fee and figured that we could too!

However it turns out that we can’t do that, there’s no way that we can manage an AdWords account properly for a client for just £99 per month, to provide the best ongoing account management for clients a percentage of spend model is best and is more cost effective in the long run as greater ROI is achieved, We could take £99 from businesses and firefight an account for them and by firefight I mean spend a couple of hours in there each month, tidy it up and then keep it from crashing and burning for as long as we could but £99 PPC management allows very little margin for actually managing PPC correctly and growing the account and increasing the ROI of it, with low fixed fee ppc it’s more a case of stopping an account from dying quickly by prolonging the spiral of decline over a longer timescale.

Realistically PPC agencies charging fixed fees like £99 (or less!!) per month for ppc management are probably spending less than 2 hours per month on a campaign or “white labelling” and farming work out to other agencies offshore and taking a fee for doing so, either that or their PPC managers are earning around minimum wage which makes one wonder how good they can be as quality ppc managers earn good money as the industry has a shortage of them.

The figures above would keep a ppc agency afloat assuming the ppc manager is a good one on a good salary, but agencies like this wouldn’t keep a good ppc account manager there for long as it’s just too many accounts to run properly, regardless of the salary, for a professional ppc manager as typically the really good ones (and why would you want anyone who isn’t really good working on your account!?) like to work with a smaller number of clients, typically between 5-20, where they can really get to know the client’s business and understand the issues that affect them and how best to achieve their business goals via PPC on AdWords, Yahoo, Bing, Facebook etc.

Consequently whilst there are many good account managers out there and no doubt some currently suffering/serving their time at low fixed price agencies, the really great ones tend to gravitate over time to ppc management agencies where a percentage of spend model is in place meaning that they can work in a more involved way with clients and really make a difference to their ppc results, for the really good ppc account managers the sense of job satisfaction comes from driving an account forward, boosting ROI and exceeding the clients expectations on an ongoing basis.

If you are offered fix fee PPC management for something like £99 or even less, then you need to really think about whether you’d like your ppc ‘managed’ by someone with just 2 hours to spare to do it each month or if a ppc management agency with resources to spend as much time as your account needs to generate the best ROI for your company is a better match.

As with most things in life cost is relative to results, paying £99 to stagnate is more expensive to your business than paying say £250 per month and having your ROI explode and with a percentage of spend payment model you’ll find that your ppc agency always has the time required to dedicate to moving your pay per click accounts forward every step of the way.

Some of our clients had never tried AdWords before and go search online or ask friends and colleagues they respect for a recommendation as to who’s good at PPC Management and thus we end up talking and take things from there.

I suspect many potential clients miss out on getting involved with AdWords as they don’t think it will work for them, they think this based on the metrics they currently see from their organic listings, they may have X visitors, Y Sales and Z Profit and assume that AdWords PPC will generate the same results but this isn’t always the case when stats are monitored, but many fail to monitor properly so they just don’t see what’s happening.

So the Million dollar /pound /Yen /Euro question if you don’t have an account or currently have a poorly performing one is will AdWords work for you? Well there is no clear cut yes or no answer here, it depends on factors such as your website and how well it can convert traffic, and where you are positioned in the supply chain for your product or service. An affiliate on 10% commission cannot really compete in terms of marketing spend at low ROI compared to a wholesaler, in turn the wholesaler can’t compete with country distributor, the distributor can’t really compete with the manufacturer, so if all four were advertising on AdWords they’d each have less margin to work with than the next guy/girl above them.

That’s not to say they can’t make AdWords work if the client is an affiliate or wholesaler or just battling with bigger competitors with very deep pockets, we often fight it out with huge brands for our clients and win through experience, skill, expertise and guile by finding new angles to exploit as well as plain and simply doing the hard work that many can’t be bothered to, we sometimes create hundreds of adgroups for a single product or service where competitors may only do a few with bland generic ads.

The main thing that potential AdWords PPC advertisers or those with an AdWords account which they feel may be under-performing is to establish clear metrics, for those who don’t have an account they can roughly use SEO metrics but with the best will in the world these will only be a very rough guide and the only real way to get good meaningful data is to take the plunge and get an account set up.

The one key, fundamental, absolute must is that CONVERSION TRACKING MUST BE INSTALLED !!!

We cannot emphasise this enough, we see many accounts without the slightest shred of conversion tracking, they’re using a cash in v cash out approach and this is where money can be saved in bulk if the conversion tracking is installed and the results acted upon.

The “proof of concept” phase is very important, new advertisers often try AdWords themselves and whilst many succeed in making a go of it, some will set up their accounts poorly, using broad match without any negative keywords, coupled with poor adverts and it will fail them, they’ll write off AdWords as something that just didn’t work for them so we would advise merchants to commit to finding out if AdWords is viable for them by enlisting a specialised PPC Management Agency to do the set up for them.

Obviously we would say that as we are one of the leading PPC Management Agencies but we often tell clients to actually lower their initial budget and concentrate on fewer product for proof of concept, before expanding out the campaign, we look for long term mutually rewarding relationships with client so we treat their money as if it were our money and approach a PPC campaign as we would do it if it were for ourselves.

For those people already getting sales from organic search listings don’t assume that the same results will happen from paid search listings even if a ppc management agency is at the helm, results can be better than organic but also worse.

Below is a screenshot from a client’s Analytics account highlighting the difference between paid and organic E-commerce results :

You can see that AdWords traffic generated 75% more revenue per basket than organic Google traffic, as well as E-commerce basket value being 7% or so higher too, the resulting Per visit value or EPC is a whopping 83% lift in value per visitor however we need to remember that AdWords needs paying for from this extra revenue so whilst the results are vastly improved we need to take the costs into account.

That being said most SEO costs money one way or another for most serious online companies now, some spend far more on SEO than PPC thinking that PPC wouldn’t generate a return, but they figure that on the current SEO metrics so we would advise every company to at least try PPC for themselves, preferably via an experienced and capable ppc management agency so as to get off to the best start.

Initially we anticipate it being an easy, cheap way to drive calls but before long we can see it becoming very widely used and expensive in some sectors, legal and high value service sales being two that spring to mind easily.

To enable the CCP option you need to use a Google forwarding number which you get when you set up Call Extensions, details >here< after this it's just a case of selecting the max CPP bid that you are willing to pay for each call and it will be activated.

New metrics to keep an eye on the CPP action include summaries of the calls, PTR (phone through rate!) as well as the all important call cost on the adgroup and campaign tabs. Each call will be detailed by call time (of day), duration, area code and the adgroup that generated the call (shown on the dimensions tab).

Currently CPP is only avalialable in the USA and UK, The max CPP bid is set at Adgroup level (not keyword!) and each adgroup must generate a minimum number of clicks first, for more information you can read up >here<

AdWords Cost per Phone Call will take a lot of the stress out of PPC management for some people as it will drive serious leads rather than tentative online enquiries although the Quality Score will still be a major factor as will the keyword selection so whilst the contact method is different to normal online activity the ppc account still needs managing properly by someone who knows what they are doing.

You can read more about undestanding CPP bidding >here.

We are the only UK PPC Management agency that has met and passed the rigorous qualification standards set out to become a featured provider and are proud to hold the badge and display it on our site and formally offer our services to charities around the world as Google AdWords account managers.

Our earliest work with a charity was UNICEF back in 2007 and we are well aware of the issues that charities face when trying to compete with for-profit organisations online when raising funds or drawing awareness to their mission and we look forward to applying our experience, skills and holistic approach to help charities raise funds and make the difference the wish to in the world.

If you are a charity and have an existing Google grant then please drop us a line to see how we can help you maximise the value of the gift that Google is so good to give to you.

If you are a registered charity and are not in receipt of a Google grant then give us a call and we will help you along the way to get a considerable grant each month from Google to further promote your charity and raise funds for it, there are certain eligibility guidelines but we can assess what you are looking to use the Google charity grant for before application to ensure a greater chance of a successful application.

We are happy to consider managing AdWords for any charity around the world but of course any UK charity AdWords management is particularly welcome.

You may be toying with the idea of getting a PPC management agency but another month passes whilst you manage your AdWords account yourself, or someone in your company does it but it’s not their main job and they fit it in when they can. This isn’t really treating AdWords with the respect it commands these days, rest assured that some of your competitors are engaging ppc management professionals to optimise their AdWords accounts.

We know for a fact that one potential client is giving Google £48,000 more than it needs to every year, that’s £4,000 per month every month, month in, month out, they are basically writing Google a cheque for almost £48,000.00 per year :

We know this as gave a free AdWords health check on their account six months ago, their marketing manager is overworked, she’s looking after several marketing methods and whilst she keeps in touch with us (she want’s us onboard) the board of the company still haven’t taken the decision to actually do anything about their AdWords, they haven’t implemented a single one of our recommendations from our free health check report into their AdWords accounts and consequently they are giving Google an extra £4,000 every month for a fact.

You may be wondering how we can be so sure of this figure, well it’s based on a decade of PPC management experience and our time tested PPC management optimisation process, We reconfigure accounts to a more logical and relevant structure then focus on boosting quality scores up towards to reduce click costs, we don’t just keep changing the bid prices like many agencies do, that’s treating a symptom not the cause!

Search Engine Marketing is one of the most misunderstood areas in modern business today, much of it is due to spammy SEO practices and outright lies from greedy SEM companies, We’ve seen some charge thousands per month and then go on to actually spend a couple of hundred pounds on the client’s account, consequently most people don’t really believe what they’re told and they don’t do anything as a result,  for many of them this inaction is costing them real money.

Whilst we love Google’s ability to generate leads and sales we hate the thought of companies paying them more money than they deserve, We can slash costs in AdWords accounts, we are so confident that we can add value to a business that we will work the first month totally free just to show what we can do, if they decide to take the account back in house at that point then there’s no hard feelings.

AdWords is getting more complicated to use by the month and their competitors are probably using every feature to get ahead so sooner or later  people using AdWords seriously realise that they need a ppc management agency to maximise their sales, slash costs and boost ROI.

Stop paying Google 30%+ more than they deserve every month, Get your free AdWords health check report by dropping us a line today.

The client contacted us in a state of distress, they were annoyed at how things were running and the attitude of their current ppc management agency. For their £1,000 per month spend they don’t own the AdWords account, have no access to it and have to trust the PPC agency as to how much has been spent out of the £1,000 they are billed each month and that they are targeting all the relevant keywords at good cost per click prices.

There is no conversion tracking in place so even the PPC agency don’t know which keywords are converting, they won’t tell the client how much they are spending specifically and on which keywords, in fact they have no clue as to even how many keywords are being bid on. The ppc agency say they spend £600 on clicks and take £400 in ppc management costs, totalling a set fee of £1,000 per month.

This isn’t the right way for a good client and ppc agency relationship, there is zero transparency and despite spending many thousands of pounds over the last few months the client doesn’t even own the AdWords account so is now faced with starting from scratch with us, it’ll won’t be a problem for us to start from scratch but it will but it’s never as good as having historic data to work with, although in this instance we don’t imagine it’s going to take too long to catch up as it’s such a tightly focussed, geo targeted campaign.

We often see some other ppc agencies have been adding a margin on each click as well as their standard ppc management fees, these dodgy ppc agencies make a good wedge of extra profit by keeping the merchant from having access to the AdWords account so ensure that you do have access and you check the AdWords spend for accuracy, if you can’t see how much you’ve been spending then you may be paying more than you should be.

Not all agencies that set up accounts in their own name and deny clients access are misbehaving but we can’t think of a single valid reason for not having transparency or ensuring the AdWords account belongs to the client. At best it’s a case of them not wanting anyone clumsily hoofing around in there and at worst it’s leverage/blackmail to keep the merchant with the ppc agency due to the perceived cost and hassle involved with setting up from scratch and it’s also a great way to boost profit by tweaking the cost per click figures.

The moral of the story here if you are a merchant is to ensure that you have access to the AdWords account and that it’s your account, in your name and you regularly check that the AdWords spend matches the billing amounts.

There are some fine PPC agencies out there so if you aren’t happy with any aspect of your current ppc management then it’s time to kick your agency into line or start looking for a new one, just beware of how things are set up from the start and it leaves you in good shape to move on easily at minimum cost and hassle.

This year we have noticed an increase in the PPC agencies out there offering Performance PPC management as a revenue model option, and whilst this sounds attractive, especially when pitched by slick agencies, is it really the good deal they make it out to be?

In an earlier blog post we covered the different PPC management charging models, we have always preferred to work on a percentage of spend revenue model where we basically spend as much of the client’s money as possible knowing that the more we spend, the more we earn!

If you’re a merchant reading this you’re probably thinking something along the lines of “WHAT..did I just read that properly”  they’re just going to go crazy and spend as much cash as possible, but in reality there is far more to it than just spending as much cash as we can. We run to the client’s KPI’s, so if they say they want as many sales as they can get at £10 per sale or less, then that’s what we’ll optimise the account and budget to do, some sales may be £1, some may be £10 or even over, but on average we’ll hit their target KPI as quickly as possible from a solidly performing account. Once the KPI is hit we often find the volume can be increased but it’d down to the merchant analysing their profit margins at the volume and cost per sale before taking the decision to try to go for more market share.

With the pay for performance ppc management model that we have seen some agencies offer lately it’s become apparent that they are touting it as a zero risk marketing channel but in reality it’s one that doesn’t suit that many merchants. It may sound great that the agency build the PPC account and pay the PPC bill and you just pay them a set fee plus bonus or set fee per sale that increases as sales volume does etc. however the reality is that they operate like affiliate marketers (we should know; it’s where we started in 2001) in that they focus on the products that make them the most profit and not so much on the products that might still be profitable for the merchant.

A client was lured away a couple of months back with the sparkly promises of the Pay for performance ppc Model but after a few weeks of running it was apparent that their business was actually being harmed :

With the pay for performance ppc management model we saw the merchant’s normal percentage of spend model PPC costs go from around £1.00 per sale on a 60% brand to 40% generic sales split; to over £2.50 per sale with a 87% brand to 13% generic sales split, so in effect their own brand traffic was then being used to drive 87 out of 100 sales and their costs had been increased by 150% with the overall sales volume having dropped as the agency had stopped trying to get the longer tail less profitable ROI term sales (for them, despite them being still profitable for the merchant on the percentage of spend ppc management model!) needless to say the came back to us for the more transparent percentage of spend ppc management model.

This isn’t the only instance which we have come across and there are some success stories out there, although most seem to be bigger merchants with huge marketing budgets so it does work for some merchants but we would definitely advise merchants to be very careful about the PPC management revenue model they choose, in addition to picking a model always beware of being locked into long contracts with a new agency and beware of who actually owns the AdWords Account as we have a case or two each week of someone coming to in a bit of state where their current PPC agency have ownership of the account and they can’t move away easily from them.

These companies also vary in how they do PPC management, some do it totally themselves whilst others outsource to a lone PPC consultant, others may give the task to a general online marketing agency, and finally some may let a dedicated PPC agency take care of their PPC management.

Depending on the type of business and size of the PPC account one scenario may be a better option than another for some companies, a lone consultant is often cheaper than a mixed agency as is a dedicated ppc management agency as they only specialise in PPC management and thus don’t have to have people with vastly different skill sets. Some general agencies we have seen “specialise” in a vast array of services such as ppc management, Email marketing, web design, media buying, SEO, social media, remarketing etc. very few can be specialists in all these different disciplines and do each one professionally at a fair rate.

A dedicated PPC agency is a good fit for any size of company that’s looking to get the best from their PPC marketing, a good dedicated agency will have AdWords qualified PPC account managers and be an AdWords certified company to show that they have staff who have met the criteria set by Google and that they understand and have experience of managing PPC campaigns to get the best from them.

Another plus of using a dedicated PPC agency is that they’ll only do Pay Per Click management, they won’t be sidetracked with other services that aren’t PPC focussed so their staff will be working on ppc management every day, keeping up to date with the changes on Google AdWords, Yahoo, Bing, Facebook PPC platforms as they happen and be well placed to ensure their clients are able to react positively to them.

A dedicated PPC management agency is exposed to a variety of accounts in different sectors, this breadth of knowledge and experience can be applied to new accounts, an agency solely doing PPC is focussed on nothing but PPC so their brains are orientated to think PPC and how to get the client’s USP’s and benefits over to their prospective clients in the best way, consequently the adcopy is rich and engaging, it pre-qualifies  visitors and helps boost on site conversion etc.

An agency solely dedicated to PPC management will have good company contacts, they’ll have a Google AdWords agency rep who can help resolve issue quickly as well as a host of recommendations for other high quality specialists if you need other marketing related services, such as SEO and social media professionals who are more than capable in their chosen field.

A good ppc management agency will be health checking dozens of new accounts per month from new business enquiries as Targeted Media does and over that time we see the same mistakes time and time again, broad matched keywords with no or very limited number of negative keywords, adgroups that aren’t set around a core theme , instead having sometimes hundreds of keywords that have no real relationship to the adcopy and even the landing page the traffic is sent to.

It’s not just small PPC accounts that have these basic mistakes, we’ve seen accounts spending double figure thousands per month that have fundamental mistakes, and some of the more general agencies don’t seem to pick just how specifically targeted PPC accounts need to be set up and refined to get the best out of them. Many of these accounts have already been set up and/or managed by some of the bigger general agencies with a ppc management department and yet we, like other dedicated PPC agencies are still able to wring more savings and generate higher ROI from refining the targeting of the traffic, sending the better targeted traffic to the right page and even working with the client to maximise the effectiveness of on page changes to increase the conversion ratio.

There’s no such thing as cheap PPC management, it’s either done cheaply and usually without enough attention to detail, or it’s done right and t the PPC agency usually more than covers their costs in the enhanced ROI from the savings from click discounts and increased on site conversion so good PPC management is usually a positive investment that more than pays for itself, not only in the increased performance but also the time and hassle savings leaving the business owners or management free to work on the business instead of in it.

If you’re thinking of outsourcing your PPC management then there are some PPC questions that you should be considering before making a choice of PPC agencies.

We would delighted to discuss your requirements, for a no obligation chat use the call back form to the right, contact form here or drop us a line on 0800 228 9122

Is it best to pay your agency on a Flat fee, Performance or percentage of spend basis?

As if PPC management isn’t a confusing enough environment for the average merchant there’s also the critical factor of how a ppc management agency should be compensated. There are 3 main payment models and one less used model, all with pros and cons so we’ll cover them below.

1)  The Flat Fee PPC Management fee Model

Pros : Both you and your PPC agency knows the score with regard to costs, month in month out you’ll pay a set fee for the ppc agency to manage your accounts, The merchant can budget accordingly as it’s a fixed cost service.

Cons : The PPC agency only have to do an adequate job to keep the client happy as the fee is fixed. There’s no major incentive here for the ppc agency to shine, cut costs or even work even harder and expand the account out to generate more sales etc. as they know as long as they merely perform adequately they’ll get paid and keep the client for another month

2) The Performance Marketing PPC Management fee Model

Pros : Performance marketing is zero risk PPC marketing option where you pay nothing until a sale is made and then you pay a set fee or percentage per sale, so as a merchant it’s a good way to limit cost and only pay when sales are made. Another bonus is that for cash strapped merchants the ppc agency usually use their own account that the merchant has no access to and they pay their own spend too, the merchant just pays for every sale. (somewhat like affiliate marketing)

Cons : Most PPC Agencies running a performance PPC account model will focus hard on brand terms and not chase the sales that don’t yield a positive ROI for them, and sadly as their on a lower fee than the margin the merchant who could actually run their PPC at on a flat fee or percentage of spend model then sales are lost there. We saw one merchant’s PPC costs go from around £1.00 per sale with a 60% brand to generic split on a normal percentage of spend model, to over £2.50 per sale with a 87% brand to generic split, so in effect their own brand traffic was being used to drive 87 out of 100 sales and their costs had been increased by 150% and the overall sales volume had dropped as the agency had stopped trying to get the longer tail less profitable ROI term sales. Once we pointed this out they ceased their performance payment model with their current agency. Another big minus point is that the AdWords/Yahoo/Bing etc. PPC account is not the merchant’s property, so you could be getting great volumes of sales but then decide to take it in house and you can’t, you’d have to start from scratch, guessing at the keywords that work etc.

3) The Percentage of Spend PPC Management fee Model

Pros : The ppc agency is incentivised to grow the account to spend as much money as possible, but at the merchant’s target cost per lead or sale as the more the client spends the more the agency earns, but of course the agency is thinking long term so the spend needs to yield good results at a good ROI for the merchant to stay a client longer than the first week or month so it’s always done with the target cost per lead or sale in mind. The ppc agency naturally do the hard work to increase the spend level by creating many new adgroups. It’s also like performance marketing in that if they ppc agency increase the spend (whilst keeping an eye on the cost per lead/sale metrics) they will be rewarded more.

Cons : There is usually a minimum fee per month of a few hundred to thousand pounds (charges in London are usually high hundreds to low thousands) to cover the account building/reconfiguration work (sometimes a campaign fee is charged too) then as the agency work harder and build out a great account with good strong campaigns the spend should increase at the same time as the cost per sale decreases in most cases. The spend will vary by month and should actually increase over time as the account is expanded, of course the PPC Agencies fees should always be proportional to the income generated from PPC if it’s run properly.

4) Hybrid PPC Management fee Model

Pros : Some agencies/merchants prefer a mixed model where they are paid a flat or minimum fee and then a performance based override for when a certain sales/lead volume is hit or for sales over a certain amount etc. and this is a great way to get your PPC agency psyched up to work hard for you.

Cons : Some agencies will chase the easy money again, Brand names, or cross brand action on your competitor keywords so careful attention and monitoring is needed to ensure the agency aren’t just chasing the easy sales and ignored the sales that are more profitable for the merchant.

Summary :

Picking the right model for you isn’t always straight forward, But as a PPC agency with 10 years experience this is our thoughts on it;

A flat ppc management fee doesn’t incentivise an agency to do anything much, plus in order to increase billing revenues the ppc agency has to take on more clients, there’s no way to grow the agency or increase profits viably in the long term without more accounts.

A Performance marketing ppc management fee model can work for some merchants however the danger is that as the ppc agency are working solely to generate sales to get paid they’ll concentrate on what drives sales and high ROI for them, and not the merchant, so often they’ll target the merchant’s brand terms hard, brand and generics to a degree and then some long tail but only those that they can make a profit on, whereas the merchant’s own ppc or either the flat fee or percentage of spend model would be viable to chase those sales for the merchant and mop up every one of them they could.

The Percentage of spend ppc management fee model is in our opinion the best model as the ppc agency is incenitivised to work hard for the merchant, spend as much money as possible (by growing the campaigns out and not bidding high) but at the merchant’s target cost per lead or sale. the harder the agency work the more they should earn so growing revenues for the agency (whilst keeping clients happy) is a simple case of spending more but hitting the merchant’s target cost per lead or sale.

The Hybrid ppc management fee model is a good variation on the main 3 and can work well for some merchants, it’s format varies from flat fee to minimum fee and percentage but plus bonus for hitting certain volumes or even a revenue share so it’s worth exploring if a more inventive approach is required but for most the percentage of spend model is the best starting point.

For a no obligation chat about how we may be able to help you reduce costs and increase sales use the call me back form below, or ring free 0800 228 9122 or use our contact form HERE

PPC management used to be easy when we first started in 2001, We just popped keywords into Google AdWords on broad match and then bid 10p/20p/50p etc. (even for what are now high cost keywords like credit card/loan terms!) and let the traffic flow to the site, it was very easy, there wasn’t much competition and traffic converted fantastically so conversion rate optimisation wasn’t something we worried about, traffic was cheap and plentiful, if a visitor didn’t convert we just bought more!

Fast forward 10 years and pay per click has evolved to a specialist sector, competition is high in all but the lowest traffic niches and costs are high, sometimes cripplingly so, we regularly work in sectors costing over £20 per click! so every click really does count and every visitor we can get to a site is one visitor we can try to convert into a sale so conversion optimisation is now (and will continue to be) a very hot topic.

Conversion optimisation (or conversion optimization if you’re American) is defined on wikipedia as “the process of increasing website leads and sales without spending money on attracting more visitors by reducing your visitor “bounce rate” and that’s a pretty good single sentence summary so in essence what normally happens is that small changes are made to the target page, then the page receives visitors for a period of time and the outcome is assessed, if the number of desired actions i.e leads, sales, downloads etc. is greater then that change is declared an improvement and thus the winner of the test.

In short we see successful conversion optimisation test outcomes as free sales for our clients as they have already paid for the traffic, we just make it convert better than it did to begin with and we can chalk those down as extra free sales in effect so it’s worth the effort and cost to test and optimise landing pages to try to squeeze every conversion out of them that we can.

Conversion testing can be carried out on a multitude of areas; page layout, images, button size, text and colours, changes to font size, colour, wording etc. For example, changing “Fast Car Data Check” to “Instant Car Data Check” got a 20% improvement for a Car data company we worked with. Changing the ‘add to cart’ button from red to green on another client’s website resulted in the conversion rate going from 4% to 4.25% which doesn’t sound much but it added £27,000 revenue to their bottom line per year.

One site that we love for conversion optimisation inspiration is WhichTestWon.com as the tests there are many and varied covering elements such as image, font, wording, layout, colours etc. and more subtle variables, more importantly the results of the changes are shared so you get to see which version worked best. So without further delay lets look at the first of two examples that we have images for with kind written permission from whichtestwon.com

Tiles Conversion Optimisation Test.

Version A is on top and Version B is on the bottom.

The conversion optimisation test was trying to figure out if the more tiles were sold if multiple or single benefits were offered, so if you look at to area above the tile description and cost you’ll see a panel in Version A that gives 3 bullet pointed benefits, “Competitive prices, Designer ranges and Full pallet discounts”, then to the right of the three benefits is a free delivery message. In Version B you’ll see that it just mentions the free delivery offer although more prominently than Version A.

Which do you think would work best? Most of the time users need lots of information to form a purchasing decision but in this case Version B won and achieved 27.3% more than Version A. Having said that who’s to know if 3 different bullet points wouldn’t have outperformed Version B, this is why conversion rate optimisation should form part of an ongoing mission for clients of a PPC agency, even when one test wins, there are still variables to test in the ongoing mission to improve the conversion rate.

Conversion rate optimisation example number two is about images, most people give little thought to anything past page layout, they just punt it over to their designer and let them do what they do with little thought on sales, they usually think the adcopy will sell it and little else makes a difference.

Business Cards Optimisation Test.

Version A is on the top and Version B is on the bottom.

The conversion optimisation test was to see if happy smiling people convinced more PPC driven traffic to shop at the stite. Most people assume a smiling face will make sales and in many cases it does, (even then it can be further optimised, for example a smiling woman may increase conversion rate for a product or service over a smiling man or vice versa) but in this instance which version do you think convinced more people to buy?

Most people voted for Version B and if you did too then you were wrong too, Version A convinced 18.2% more people to click the buttons to start buying, so in this instance smiling people didn’t work but that’s not to say conclusively that pictures of people won’t work on this site, if for example they tried  just one person it could have worked better, then again maybe not, but all variations are worth testing.

These two examples show tests that worked well with quite subtle changes that resulted in one of each example converting better and this is what conversion rate optimisation is about, your PPC management team should be tweaking, testing and trying to improve, it’s amazing what an uplift in sales can be achieved by just a couple of changes so make sure you add some conversion optimisation testing into your Pay per click marketing, buying visitors is expensive enough, you should be making ongoing efforts to try to convert more into paying customers.

Thanks again to WhichTestWon.com for letting us feature two of the tests they featured, we love the site as it’s great for inspiration so go have a look and see if you can guess (you vote A or B before you see the results) which test won for each of the conversion optimisation tests that they have on site HERE They also have a great newsletter that keeps you up to date with new tests so it’s definitely worth signing up to.

If your conversion rate could do with a boost then drop us a line today for a no obligation chat about how we may be able to help you improve yours, sometimes it’s the subtle changes that can make meaningful changes that really affect your profitability so give us a call on 0800 228 9122 alternatively use the call me back form on the right or the contact form on our contact us page.