Many brands use the digital advertising space to improve their brand awareness. Finally, their ultimate goal of running these digital advertising campaigns is to generate “valuable leads or conversions” for their business. The common complaint from the majority of the brands is, “Our campaigns receive higher CTR than the benchmark CTR but they receive a very low conversion rate”.
Receiving the expected conversion rate from the digital advertising campaigns is cooperative work between the client side and the advertising campaign managing team side. Many factors should align to get a higher conversion rate from digital advertising campaigns. Here, I have shared 8 important factors involved in Conversion Rate Optimization.
What Is Conversion Rate? How To Calculate The Conversion Rate?
The conversion rate in digital advertising refers to the percentage of users who click on an ad do the desired action on the client’s landing page. For example, your campaign had 100 clicks and 10 conversions means, your campaign’s conversion rate is 10%. So, 10% of users who clicked your ads actually did the conversion on the client’s landing page.
Below is the simple formula to calculate the conversion rate,
Conversion Rate % = Total Conversions/Total Clicks *100
Nowadays, clients who are running brand awareness or performance campaigns, set the conversion rate benchmark to improve their campaign effectiveness. So, it is very important for advertising campaign managers to understand more about the conversion rate and optimization strategies to improve the conversion rate.
Below is the average conversion rate for each advertising channel. Please note that these numbers are just an average. Based on industry and product the conversion rate varies.
| Channel | Conversion Rate |
| Display | 0.5% – 1% |
| Video | 1% – 2 % |
| Social | 1% to 2% |
How To Setup Conversion Points Properly?
Setting up conversion points on the right points of the landing page is very important for analyzing the conversion rate. Let’s consider, the client needs to track form submission as the conversion point.
Mostly, the campaign managers create one conversion pixel and send it to the client to implement on the conversion point. Technically this is correct. But, practically this is not enough for conversion rate optimization.
So, What the campaign managers should do? Simply create another pixel and implement the pixel in the landing page. If the conversion journey is long, create additional pixels and implement them on the journey tracking points.
For example, the landing page is xyz.com and the form is available on xyz.com/ticket-booking. The client wants to track the total bookings so they only put the conversion pixel on the “thank you page”.
In this situation, you can track the total conversion on your campaigns. But, you don’t know how many users who clicked your ads actually landed on the landing page properly and left without booking the ticket.
So, always implement one pixel on the actual landing page and place more pixels on various conversion points. Placing pixels at more conversion points will help you to understand more about the user journey. This helps you to find where more users leave from the client’s website. So, you can optimize your landing page and ad campaign to improve the conversion rate.
Causes For Low Conversion Rate
Below are the main causes for the low conversion rate,
- Campaign Strategy
- Audience Targeting
- Low Quality Clicks
- Ad – Landing Page Relevancy
- High Bounce Rate
- Landing Page Design & Speed
- Conversion Journey
- Product Value
Campaign Strategy
In an Ad Platform, many objective goals are available to run an ad campaign. Based on your objective goal, your platform drives your campaign to achieve its goal.
For example, you keep your display campaign’s primary goal as 0.30% CTR, and the secondary goal as 70% viewability. Then your platform optimizes this campaign to achieve these two goals. The platform first focuses on achieving the primary goal and along with the primary goal, it tries to achieve the secondary goal which is a soft goal.
Each platform has a different set of primary goals and you can choose them based on your requirement. For example, CPM, CTR, CPC, CPA, etc are available in every ad platform. Mostly, people will use the CPM model for brand awareness campaigns. Use the CTR, CPC model for trafficking campaigns which drive more users to the website. CPA model for conversion related campaigns.
Many clients requested to run their advertising campaigns with a Brand Awareness goal. So, campaign managers only focus on the CPM and CTR metrics which are important for brand awareness campaigns. At the end, the client will also look for conversion numbers. We mostly receive low conversion numbers for brand awareness campaigns. Because our primary goal is not conversion.
So, choosing the right buying strategy is very important for getting the expected results. For example, suppose the client is looking for a conversion campaign and the brand is new. In that case, you can create a campaign strategy by splitting the budget and flight for running an awareness campaign, a traffic campaign, and finally, a conversion campaign.
Audience Targeting
In any channel, choosing relevant audience targeting is very important for improving the conversion rate. Usually, audiences are grouped at various levels. You need to choose a narrow audience for your advertising campaign.
For example, suppose the client is a “Travel Company” and they want to run a conversion campaign for their newly launched “Travel To Australia” holiday plan. In that case, you need to target the people who are all interested to travel Australia.
Instead, if you choose audiences who are all interested in travel you may receive good reach, good viewability, and even good CTR. In that situation, you may receive a low conversion rate because you have chosen a very broad audience.
So, always choose a narrow audience to receive a good conversion rate. When people are really interested to travel Australia, they will check the landing page and do the conversion.
Low Quality Clicks
Most of the ad campaigns really suffered with low-quality clicks. Low quality clicks are generated by accidental clicks or by revenue making MFA Inventories. So, the conversion chance from these clicks is very low.
The campaign managers should identify the source of low quality clicks and exclude them from your campaigns. So, you can spend your money on finding the right people.
Ad – Landing Page Relevancy
The message in the advertisement should align with the content available on the landing page. Otherwise, people will leave the landing page very quickly. So, the bounce rate will rise.
When the advertisement message aligns with the landing page, people are more likely to stay on the landing page and learn more about the product or service that is being offered. Here, the user’s expectations are met, so they feel like they have landed in the correct place.
Also, the conversion point should be available on the landing page. The conversion journey between the landing page and the conversion page should not be long. Otherwise, your conversion rate will be low.
How to check legitimacy of a website?
High Bounce Rate
Bounce Rate is an analytics metric that helps to understand how fast the visitors leave the website. Usually, the source of advertising channels always has a high bounce rate.
| Advertising Channel | Avg Bounce Rate |
| Display | 70% to 90% |
| Social | 50% to 60% |
| Organic Search | 30% to 40% |
| Paid Search | 20% to 30% |
| Direct | 20% to 30% |
| Social | 10% to 20% |
There are many reasons that could lead to the high bounce rate,
- Low-quality clicks from ad campaigns
- Relevancy mismatch between Ad message vs Landing page content
- Long conversion journey
When the bounce rate is low for your channel, then your conversion rate will be low. Both are inversely proportional to each other. So, you have to work more efficiently to reduce the bounce rate for your advertising channel.
Mostly, the clients only have analytics access, and they are not interested in sharing the analytics access with you. In that situation, the campaign managers can use the conversion rate metrics to optimize the campaign.
For example, you run a display campaign, and its current conversion rate is about 0.1%. However, the industry-wide average conversion rate for display channels is about 0.5% to 1%. So, you need to optimize your campaign.
Landing Page Design & Speed
Landing page design and speed are the most important aspects of gaining more conversions. When people try to open the landing page by clicking the ad, the landing page should open very quickly. Otherwise, there may be a high chance of leaving the website.
The landing page design also plays a crucial role in holding the user’s attention for a long time. The landing page design should look like a professional site. Otherwise, people do not stay a long time and do not convert.
Conversion Journey
The conversion journey should be very low to get more conversions. For example, the conversion point is two pages away from the actual landing page. In that case, the user needs to spend more time on the landing page and click the appropriate buttons to reach the conversion point. This long conversion journey automatically decreases the conversion opportunities.
Usually, digital advertising campaigns are designed to optimize themselves. For a conversion campaign, they should receive a certain number of conversions to learn the characteristics of the audiences who make the conversion. Once the learning period is over, campaigns automatically optimize to reach the potential people who are really making the conversions.
When you receive a conversion campaign, please check the conversion journey. If it is one or two steps away from the landing page then ask the client to move the conversion point to the landing page. That is ask them to move the booking forms, etc to the landing page to increase the conversion rate.
Product Value
Product Value and Brand Value are very important factors for a higher conversion rate. For example, apple runs a conversion campaign for “new iPhone booking”. In that case, many users complete the booking form. Because, the brand value of Apple is very high and also, and the product value of the iPhone is also very high. So, the conversion rate for this campaign is automatically high.
Similarly, the conversion rate will be higher when you provide huge discounts or attractive offers. Both client and campaign managers should understand the relationship between the product values with conversion rate. Without understanding this relation, you can’t identify the expected conversion rate for your campaign.
Conclusion
Many clients complain about the low conversion rate. As I explained above, many reasons are associated with the conversion rate. Place the conversion points in appropriate places, optimize the landing page, narrow down the targeting audiences and other settings, and check the quality of clicks are the few important points you need to keep in mind when thinking about conversion rate.
I hope this article helps you to understand more about the conversion rate. Along with that, I have written many articles about the “Programmatic Advertising Course”. Take your time and read those articles.
