5 Ways Data Improves Your SaaS Conversion Funnel

Not using data is a missed opportunity for SaaS companies.

If your team is seeking to bring in more revenue, data helps your conversion funnel. It's the difference between knowing your customer or simply taking a wild guess.

Matt Ackerson, founder of Petovera, says, “The rise of the smart sales funnel is happening now. You can expect it to become a near marketing 'requirement' as businesses adopt the strategy and new tools and tech come out around the concept.”

Whether it's acquiring more qualified leads or retaining loyal consumers, build your sales system on a foundation of analytics. This provides your team with the ability to produce informed decisions.

Make a deliberate effort to focus on the data. Here are five ways to improve your sales funnel.

1. Spark Interest With Awareness

Studies show that “72% of buyers turn to Google during awareness stage research.” Your customers are constantly searching for solutions to their problems.

That's why your team must be ready to provide solution-oriented content. Not only will it answer their most pressing issues, but great content also will engage them in learning more about your SaaS brand and products.

Grab your prospects' attention with data-driven content.

“…[D]etermine their interests and how they act upon those interests. While it may not be feasible to develop true one-to-one content at scale, you can use this data to pinpoint common characteristics and habits of individual audience segments…” writes Brad Messinger, senior vice president of marketing, Rise Interactive.

Conduct keyword research to understand your consumer's intent. Find high-performing keywords with tools such as, Google Keyword Planner and Keyword Tool.

Find out what your customer desires. Then, generate awareness around that subject.

For example, host a webinar. It will display your SaaS's expertise and provide your audience with useful information. Keep it short and engaging.

After the webinar, you can post a recap on your blog with the slides and additional details.

2. Nurture Targeted Leads

MarketingSherpa reports that “79% of marketing leads never convert into sales. Lack of lead nurturing is the most common cause of this poor performance.”

Several reasons exist for inadequate lead nurturing. Your team may be targeting the wrong people. Your lead capturing system fails to filter out unqualified leads. Or you're not providing the right service to the right client.

“Evaluate your target market and make sure you understand what B2B buyers in your sector really value. With this in mind, you can communicate the cost benefits, ROI, and affordability of your products or services in a way that will really resonate with your audience,” says Leo Patel, freelance writer and digital strategist.

Nurturing involves catering to several types of customers. Data segmentation is an effective tool for sending tailored messages to different people. Moreover, a targeted campaign can help reduce your budget costs.

Develop buyer personas based on industries, website behavior, and past purchases.

Think of nurturing as a process, not a one-time transaction. It's rare that people will make a purchase from just one interaction.

Rather, train your SaaS team to execute multiple customer touch points. Explore what excites and intrigues your customers.

3. Cultivate Trust for the Sale

Customers don't buy products from companies. They buy from their family and friends.

In other words, consumers make purchasing decisions based on recommendations from people they respect. Trust is the cornerstone of most sales transactions.

Ensure customers that your SaaS product is trustworthy. And social proof helps decrease the customer's purchasing resistance.

“The best part about social proof techniques is that they are fairly simple to implement. They don't require a lot of effort to be put up, and certainly not much investment in terms of cash,” says, Deeksha Bahl, social media manager at VWO.

Case studies provide insight into a current customer's story. They also convince prospects who need that extra push to purchase. HelpScout provides interested buyers with video case studies.

Trust is hard to earn but easy to lose. So, don't take it for granted.

Walter Rogers, CEO of CCI Global Holdings, advises to never misrepresent the benefits of your product:

“Customers don't want a product or solution that only comes close to meeting their needs, or that usually functions properly. Give them the whole, unvarnished truth, and let them decide if the proposed solution will work for them.”

4. Adjust the Onboarding Process

McKinsey found that “satisfaction on customer journeys is 30% more predictive of overall customer satisfaction than measuring happiness for each individual interaction.”

Just because the sale is complete doesn't mean your work is done. An effective onboarding process cements your new customer's success.

“After the initial welcome email, you have a great opportunity to keep your new customer engaged and educated by sending them a drip campaign of emails. This is your best chance of getting the customer to really use all the features of your product,” states Ed Shelley, Director of Content Marketing at ChartMogul.

Identify friction points preventing your customer from loving your product.

What's causing them to stop using your service? Are their questions being fully answered? How can you improve customer interactions?

Delivering accurate onboarding means understanding what customers value. Use multiple inputs from the customer analyses to make improvements.

One way is to collect qualitative data from in-app messaging conversations. Observe what features and functions interest customers.

On the Frontleaf blog, Rachel English also suggests analyzing various customer data streams. Monitor what your onboarding customers do:

• In the application


• In terms of results achieved


• In scheduling or attending coaching sessions


• In providing feedback on surveys


• In their interactions with support


• In their consumption of self-service resources


• In any way you can track

After the sale, go above and beyond to satisfy your customer. Your goal is to create the best user experience.

5. Retain the Right Customer

According to reports, “80% of your company's future revenue will come from just 20% of your existing customers.”

SaaS companies normally get anxious about renewals. They want customers to renew today or else.

That's when unethical sales practices arise. Then, customers that once loved your services become skeptical and decide not to repurchase.

Develop loyalty programs that encourage relationships, rather than more sales. Give customers a reason to be a part of your brand, not just your product.

“[I]t's reducing customer effort that's the single most important factor in creating customer loyalty,” states Len Markidan, head of marketing at Groove.

Insert personalization into your customer retention strategy. Customization provides relevancy and a one-of-a-kind experience to your loyal consumers.

Carol Roth, on-air contributor for CNBC, writes:

“Many of the biggest brands have failed to do this despite having multimillion-dollar marketing campaigns. Customers are all driven by different parameters, which means that you need to do a lot of listening and keeping track of the likes, dislikes and drivers of your customers' behavior.”

Luxury hoodie retailer Evy's Tree created the Who's Hoo Rewards Program. It focuses on creating engaged customers through rewards and referrals.

The Data-Driven Funnel

We all know data is important for SaaS conversions. It's one way to gain a competitive edge in the marketplace.

Gain brand awareness with customized content. Use analytics to discover new ways to cultivate customer relationships. And adjust your process to fix any onboarding problems.

Data is here. Improve your sales funnel.

About the Author: Shayla Price lives at the intersection of digital marketing, technology and social responsibility. Connect with her on Twitter @shaylaprice.

How to Improve Your Conversion Rate By 50% in One Day

Anyone who's worked in digital marketing knows that conversions are the lifeblood of any online marketing campaign.

You run a marketing campaign to get people to do something-sign up for your services, buy your product, fill out a lead gen form, give you their email, etc.

Essentially, you market in the hopes that people will do what you want them to do and eventually produce profitable revenue for your company.

A good campaign will get a lot of people to take your conversion action.

An ineffective campaign won't.

As a result, improved conversion rates are a key goal for any decent digital marketer. Marketing costs money, so the higher your conversion rate, the more bang you get for your buck.

Improving your conversion rate is a great goal, but to do that, we need to look at your conversion tracking.

Tracking Conversions

One of the fundamental ideas behind conversion rate optimization (CRO) is the notion that you are effectively tracking conversions.

Think about it, in order to improve your conversion rates, you have to actually know what your conversion rate is to begin with!

And, to do that, you need fantastic conversion tracking in place.

Unfortunately, most marketers aren't tracking their conversions effectively. To understand how this affects conversion rate, let's take a look at how well marketers are implementing conversion tracking in AdWords.

AdWords Conversion Tracking

AdWords is an ideal medium for conversion tracking.

Google itself makes implementing conversion tracking incredibly easy and paid search is typically a direct response marketing channel, which means that most of your conversions should be directly attributable to clicks on specific campaigns.

In contrast, higher funnel marketing campaigns like social media or branding efforts can be a lot harder to effectively track.

It's doable, but it's harder.

Since conversion tracking is so easy in AdWords, you'd think that every marketer would have great conversion tracking in place, right?

Sadly, that's not the case.

Over the past 2 years, we've audited well over 2,000 AdWords accounts at Disruptive Advertising. Amongst all of those audits, perhaps one of the most common problems was a lack of effective conversion tracking.

Accounts Without Conversion Tracking

To the credit of everyone who's encouraged conversion tracking over the years, 57.7% of AdWords accounts had set up some level of conversion tracking.

But, if only 57.7% of accounts have tracking in place, then 42.3% of AdWords account managers have absolutely no idea whether or not their campaigns are working.

Not surprisingly, AdWords campaigns without tracking rarely turn a profit.

In fact, according to Hubspot's State of Inbound report, 97% of inbound marketing campaigns without tracking fail.

So, even in AdWords-one of the most trackable marketing platforms-42% of campaigns have almost no chance of success.

Accounts With Conversion Tracking

Of the 58% of AdWords accounts with conversion tracking, half were only tracking a small percentage of their actual conversions.

In other words, 29% of AdWords accounts are technically tracking conversions, but their setup is so poor that they might as well not be tracking anything at all.

For example, in the plumbing/HVAC industry, phone calls are a major source of leads.

However, most plumbing/HVAC companies only track form submissions, which are few and far between-making forms a terrible indicator of campaign effectiveness!

Plumbers aren't the only ones with this problem, either. Many companies with millions of clicks have only a handful of conversions to their name.

Are they tracking conversions?

Technically, the answer is “yes,” but their conversion tracking isn't painting an accurate picture of the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns.

AdWords Conversion Rates

Generally speaking, a conversion rate of 2-3% is considered “typical” for an AdWords account.

Based on our data, it's easy to see why:

Clearly, the vast majority of accounts-regardless of how many clicks they get-fall into the 0-5% conversion rate window.

Conversion Rate Benchmarks

A couple of years ago, Wordstream ran an analysis on hundreds of AdWords accounts to try and create conversion rate benchmarks for AdWords performance.

Here's what they found:

• The median AdWords account had a conversion rate of 2.35%.


• The bottom 25% of accounts had a conversion rate of 0-1%.


• The top 25% of accounts had conversion rates of 5.31% or better.

To validate their results and see if anything had changed, we used Wordstream's criteria and ran the same analysis on our audit data.

Not surprisingly, our results were very similar:

• The median conversion rate for an AdWords account is 2.18%.


• 27.5% of accounts lie in the 0-1% conversion rate range.


• The top 25% of accounts have a conversion rate better than 5.34%.

Here's how the conversion rate distribution breaks down.

As you can see, 75% of AdWords accounts have a conversion rate between 0% and 5.34%.

It's a little harder to calculate from this chart, but the top 10% of advertisers have a conversion rate of over 11.03% (in Wordstream's study, the top 10% had a conversion rate of 11.45% or better).

So, if more than 5.34% of your clicks are converting, that means your conversion rate is better than 75% of AdWords advertisers.

If your conversion rate is above 11.03%, your account is in the top 10% of all AdWords accounts.

Great news, right?

Well, maybe…

Where Wordstream Went Wrong

As we were replicating Wordstream's analysis, we realized that our results weren't representative of actual account performance.

The data was skewed by bad conversion tracking.

Remember, in our audit process, we discovered that while 58% of AdWords accounts were tracking conversions, only 29% actually had an effective setup in place.

By including all of those poorly-tracked accounts in our analysis, we were heavily underestimating the actual conversion rate of AdWords accounts.

To Wordstream's credit, they had tried to account for this by excluding accounts with less than 10 conversions, but that still left a lot of accounts that we knew from our audit process weren't tracking conversions effectively.

So, we reran our analysis. But, this time we only included the few hundred accounts we knew had good conversion tracking in place.

Here's what we found:

• The median conversion rate for a well-tracked AdWords account is 3.16%.


• Only 15.2% of these accounts have a conversion rate of 0-1%.


• The top 25% of accounts have a conversion rate of 7.82% or better.


• The top 10% of well-tracked accounts have a conversion rate of over 20%!

Here's the conversion rate distribution for well-tracked AdWords accounts:

As it turned out, well-tracked AdWords accounts have a nearly 50% higher conversion rate than the average AdWords account.

What does that mean for your company?

Well, if you are advertising on AdWords and have conversion tracking in place, it's even odds that you are only tracking two-thirds of your conversions.

If you're advertising in one of those harder-to-track channels like social media, you're probably missing out on even more conversions.

How to “Improve” Your Conversion Rate in One Day

This brings us back to improving conversion rates.

To put it simply, the easiest way to improve your conversion rate is to start effectively tracking the conversions you are already getting.

That means tracking everything-phone calls, form submissions, sales, sign-ups, online chats, in-store visits-everything!

In many cases, simply accounting for your missing conversions will increase your conversion rate by 50% or more…overnight.

This will probably make your boss very happy in the short-term, but-more importantly-it will set you up for long-term success.

Think about it, if you are only tracking some of your conversions, do you really know which campaigns are your top producers?

A campaign that drives very few form submissions may actually generate a ton of chat leads. But, if you aren't tracking chats, you might assume one of your top campaigns is a flop.

Regardless of which online marketing medium you're using, great analytics tracking is key to advertising success. Without the right data, you could be leaving a ton of money on the table.

By knowing which campaigns deserve your dollar, you can dramatically improve your conversion rate, return-on-investment and capture a lot more market share.

So, take the time to work with an analytics platform like Kissmetrics or Google Analytics, get your conversion tracking set up right and start making more money.

Conclusion

Proper conversion tracking can make a world of a difference to your conversion rate.

We've seen the short- and long-term benefits of implementing effective conversion tracking with hundreds of clients, so it's well worth the time and effort.

The data may not always be as clearcut as our AdWords findings, but regardless of how you are marketing your company, quality conversion tracking is always the key to better conversion rates.

How does conversion data affect your online marketing decisions? Did you find any of this data surprising? Let me know in the comments!

About the Author: Jacob Baadsgaard is the CEO and fearless leader of Disruptive Advertising, an online marketing agency dedicated to using PPC advertising and website optimization to drive sales. His face is as big as his heart and he loves to help businesses achieve their online potential. Connect with him on LinkedIn or Twitter.

How to Craft a Data Management Plan that Pays You Back

When it comes to wrangling and taming Big Data, a data management plan is a solid first step. But what exactly is it and what does it involve? More importantly, how can you create such a plan? In this article, we'll be taking a look at how businesses large and small can create data management plans that are both smart and seamless.

The Old Problem: Silos

Silos were meant to help keep people focused on their respective tasks. Instead, they divide people, waste resources and hamper productivity. The very groups that need to be working together the most, namely sales and marketing, are shut off from each other which in turn stifles growth and innovation.

Instead, creating a more hub-and-spoke collaborative center, where each group feeds into and extracts relevant information from said Big Data, is where forward-thinking companies and organizations are headed.

Image Source: Compendian

Designate at least one person from each group to be the “representative” – and this applies to C-level executives too. These are going to be the people who essentially build and steer the Big Data ship. It's easy to get lost in the sheer volume of information. Alongside these representatives, name people from each group who will oversee the various strategies to ensure that they're continually on point and not being bogged down by minor details and technicalities.

Demonstrate What's Possible

One of the biggest sticking points with Big Data is the question “how is this really relevant to us?” Realize that different pieces of the Big Data pie are going to matter to different groups and seeing how it all comes together is like a fantastic puzzle. There's good stuff in the details, as well as the big picture.

At this point, however, it's really easy to get caught up in the sheer volume of it all. But as with every good marketing strategy, you'll need to ask yourself:

“What's going to bring us the biggest lifts?”

And make those your priority. Then gradually trickle down through lesser and lesser priority pieces until the whole thing comes together.

Organization is Just as Important as Execution

Image Source: Forrester

At this point, ideas should be coming together from all the different representatives and groups you have working together. And it's very likely that you'll want to jump right in and start getting your hands dirty with all the data.  But take the time to figure out how you'll be organizing that information first. If you don't do this at the beginning, the data will start to accumulate like a snowball rolling downhill, and eventually it will bury everyone and everything in its path.

It's also worth noting that your Data Management Plan needs to have security as its foremost priority. Kiki Burton, Senior Manager of Product Strategy at Adobe reiterates on her podcast just how crucial security is when you're formulating such a plan. In her interview, she comments that:

“The ideal [Data Management Plans] has no personally identifiable information. In order to ensure that [it] really upholds those privacy standards, there are a variety of methods to import data in an appropriate way so that it's all anonymous…It's important to really call out that a [Data Management Platform] is not going to be your CRM platform, it's not going to be your basis for all your customer information…instead, it's going to pull specific data from there, but [it needs to] be done in a very anonymous way.”

The First Building Blocks of Your Data Management Strategy

With this in mind, Kiki further advises that companies interested in building such a strategy take an inventory of all of the first party data they have. First party data includes:

• Social likes and shares


• Data from mobile devices or apps


• User subscription data


• CRM data

There's also the data collected by surveys, email marketing and other avenues – all just sitting there mostly untapped and unused. Once you have those points nailed down, then you can see about getting other information to round out your user profiles.

You may be surprised to learn what other departments in your newly cohesive group have as data. It may be something your own group never knew about or never thought to use. Here again, when we build these silos (more like giant walls) between departments, crucial information like this tends to fall through the cracks. So it's as much an organizational mission as it is a learning experience.

Decide What Information You're Going to Pull In

Now that you have all the data together, it's time to decide what's relevant. Here again, relevancy depends on your industry and what the end goal is. You could be selling an entirely digital product and be focused on subscriptions and sign ups.

Or you could be a retailer focused on in-store engagements like QR codes, co-branded credit cards and other promotional magnets. All of that information needs to be prioritized and put into the plan. This is what helps you build and “flesh out” your user personas without using any personally identifiable information.

Remember that as your users interact with your site across multiple types of media, multiple devices and different promotions, you'll be gathering information as well as providing them with a branded experience. Data management goes well beyond advertising and seeps into every interaction your customer has with you – from email to shopping in-store, to upsells, down sells and cross-sells.

The Data Economy

The bottom line when it comes to creating the kind of system that pays you back is what Kiki calls the “data economy”. In her words, “it's not just about buying data for advertising; it goes back to this larger, more cohesive personalization message and really having a platform where brands and publishers can exchange data and share data in an open marketplace.” Like it or not, the Data Economy is here to stay, and you'd better start crafting a plan now to help make sense of it. Fortunately, you've now got the starting points and a more concrete idea on what to draw upon to make it happen.

Have You Created Your Data Management Plan?

Have you built a data management plan using the strategies outlined here? How has it worked for you? Share your thoughts with us in the comments below!

About the Author: Sherice Jacob helps business owners improve website design and increase conversion rates through compelling copywriting, user-friendly design and smart analytics analysis. Learn more at iElectrify.com and download your free web copy tune-up and conversion checklist today! Follow @sherice on Twitter, LinkedIn or Google+ for more articles like this!

Are You Making These 8 AdWords E-Commerce Mistakes?

AdWords is one of the most effective methods of driving traffic to your e-commerce website. However, if poorly managed, it can result in a huge waste of money.

In this post, I'll teach you 8 mistakes that could be frustrating your AdWords efforts.

I'll also show you, step by step, how to fix the mistakes so you can unlock the full potential of AdWords and achieve the maximum possible ROI.

1. Running Ads When Your Products Are Out of Stock

Running your ads when your products are out of stock is a sure-fire way to burn through your budget with no return. If you've got a large inventory of several thousand products, then it's hard to keep track of what is and what is not in stock.

However, there is now a smart way to keep track of your whole inventory and automatically pause ads when your products are out of stock.

Russell Savage recently wrote a script that allows you to do this automatically at scale, even if you have an inventory of tens of thousands of products.

When Base Fashion introduced a similar feature, they saw an increase in their conversion rate of 12%.

To implement this into your account, follow these 6 steps:

Step 1. Go to this URL and copy the script.

Step 2. Go to your AdWords account and, under “Bulk operations,” select “Scripts.”

Step 3. Click “+ Script” and paste the script that Russell Savage wrote into your account.

Step 4. You will need to slightly modify the script. Don't worry, you don't need any coding experience for this. Find an out-of-stock product on your website and check your website's source code. Search for the word “stock,” and you should see that one of them will look something like this: “in_stock”:false. Make a note of this.

Step 5. Check a product that is in stock, and you should see something like this: “in_stock”:true.

Step 6. Go to line 23 of the script and replace the OUT_OF_STOCK_TEXT variable with the one you found on the page. In this case, “in_stock”:false. Because this is different for every website, I would recommend using Russell Savage's script on one product first as a test to be sure you have identified the variable correctly.

2. Not Building Granular Accounts with Adverts for Each Product

Building incredibly granular accounts that target adverts at category pages, right down to subcategory and product pages, is the key to success with AdWords. But I still see advertisers who don't write adverts for every product they stock.

By writing ads for each product, you can capitalize on high click-through rates and conversion because shoppers searching for exact products are late in the buying cycle. Conversion rates of 5-10% are common.

If you have a large account of thousands of products and you have new products going in and out of stock all the time, this can seem like a daunting task. There is, however, a smarter solution.

Both Google DoubleClick and AdWords Robot have introduced something called inventory-aware campaigns that create ad groups, adverts, and keywords for all your products automatically, using pre-defined templates, based on the data in your Google Merchant Center.

Here is how it works:

By implementing this strategy, a trendy apparel and accessories company was able to increase their conversion rate by 50% and their CTR by 26%. The most staggering fact was that they were able to save 38 hours by automating this task.

3. Not Adding Social Proof to Your Ads

Trust symbols and reviews are a great way to build trust in your brand and occupy more real estate on the first page of Google search results. (Studies have shown that 61% of users read online reviews before making a purchase online.) There are two main ways to obtain this trust and positioning – seller rating extensions and review extensions.

Seller rating extensions are the 5 stars that appear alongside your adverts in Google search results. Below, you can see Comparethemarket using them effectively.

A study by Google found that by implementing these extensions, advertisers have seen rises in CTR of 17% and increases in conversions of up to 4.8% with 50 positive reviews.

The easiest way to implement this type of extension is to sign up to an independent review service that has been approved by Google, such as Revoo or Trustpilot. Simply acquire 30 customer reviews over a 12-month period on one of Google's partnered review providers, and the stars will automatically appear alongside your ads.

Review extensions are another way to add social proof to your ads. To add review extensions to your ads, you will need an independent review on a reputable website.

By implementing review extensions, advertisers have seen increases in click-through rates of between 26-44% depending on the industry, and increases in conversion rates of approximately 27%.

Review extensions can be implemented within the “Ad extensions” section of the AdWords interface.

4. Not Using AdWords Countdowns to Create Urgency During Sales

When I'm browsing through Google, I see no end of advertisers running sales without countdown timers to generate urgency and increase CTR's and conversion rates.

Matt Umbro recently ran a case study on the effect of using countdown timers. They saw the CTR increase from 2.87% to 4.02% for adverts with a countdown timer and a $3.66 decrease in cost per conversion.

It's also interesting to see how conversions increased dramatically as the number of days to the end of the sale decreased. If you look at the graph below, you will see that conversion rate increased from 8.24% to 10.80% at its peak just before the sale.

If you want to start using countdown timers inside your ads, then follow these steps:

Step 1. Go to this URL and copy the script.

Step 2. Go to your AdWords account and, under “Bulk operations,” select “Scripts.”

Step 3. Click “+ Script” and paste the script that Russell Savage wrote into your account.

Step 4. Apply the script to the ad groups or campaigns that contain the adverts you want the countdown timer to run for. Full instructions on how to edit the script to do this are on Google's Developers page.

Step 5. Add parameters to your advert that will be replaced with the number of hours remaining. For example: Only {param1:a few} days {param2:and} hours left!

5. Not Considering Attribution Modeling When Bidding or Pausing Ads

Savvy shoppers make as many as 9 visits to your e-commerce store before they make a purchase. However, Google shows you only the last keyword that was clicked on before a user makes a purchase.

What this hides is that you have several profitable keywords within your account contributing to conversions, but they have no conversions attributed to them.

Because the keywords look unprofitable, advertisers routinely pause them, thinking that they are a waste of money. However, without these keywords, users would not have found the brand and consequently would not have made a purchase down the line.

For example, here is a search funnel for a fictitious airline company. You can see that a searcher first found the website by searching “Hawaii vacations,” then saw an ad when they searched “flights to Hawaii,” and then finally visited the website again when they searched “flyaway Hawaii” to book their holiday. In the company's AdWords reports, the company would see only one conversion for “flyaway Hawaii,” which would hide the fact that without having ads appear for “Hawaii vacations,” the searcher would never have found the website.

To see the keywords that contributed to the conversion, the company would need to look at the click-assisted conversions column and the impressions-assisted conversions column. These would show which keywords and adverts contributed to a conversion.

Before you pause a keyword that is not performing well, make sure you view these columns. Also, make sure the keyword is not part of a search funnel. Otherwise, you are likely to significantly reduce your conversions if the keyword is fundamental to people discovering your brand in the first place.

Attribution modeling is also important when bidding in AdWords, and it's very important that you choose the right model. Google provides 5 different models you can use to analyze your data. As this is quite an in-depth topic, I won't discuss it here. However, to learn about it, I would suggest reading “embracing the reality of multi-touch attribution.”

6. Not Using Single Keyword Ad Groups for Top-Performing Keywords

Single keyword ad groups are one of the most effective methods of improving the performance of your account. When Audi applied them to their account, they saw a 50% reduction in the cost per lead and a 106% increase in conversions.

So, what are single keyword ad groups and why do they work this well?

Simply put, they are ad groups with just one keyword and two ads.

Image Source

The reason this works so well is the ads in the ad group will show only for that one keyword, which means you can make the ads highly specific to that keyword. As a result, you will see a considerable increase in CTR.

Furthermore, you can direct people to the most relevant landing page. For example, if the keyword is men's medium red t-shirts, you can use the filters on your website to send users to that exact page. The beauty of this is that you achieve a good increase in conversion rate as people see exactly what they searched for straight away.

In an ideal world, you would have every keyword in your account in its own single keyword ad group. But the problem with doing this is that it would take forever. Instead, be smart. I have found that 85% of conversions come from the top 5% of keywords in an account. This roughly correlates to every search query with 2 or more conversions. So create single keyword ad groups only for these search queries.

I won't go through how to create single keyword ad groups here because there are already several guides, such as this one and this one from Unbounce.

7. Not Managing Google Shopping Search Queries Effectively

If you have thousands of keywords generating thousands more search queries, keeping on top of them can be very difficult and time-consuming. However, there is an easier way. It takes a little bit of time to set up, but once you have it set up, it will work automatically, and you won't need to think about it again.

Daniel Gilbert recently wrote a script that effectively puts the keywords back into AdWords Shopping Campaigns.

It works like this: You add the keywords that you want your shopping campaigns to be shown for into a spreadsheet. The script then reads the search query report. If the search query does not match your keywords in your spreadsheet, then it's added as a negative keyword. Each ad group has its own set of keywords, which can be defined in a spreadsheet, giving you unlimited control.

To get this script to work, all you have to do is download it here, and then create a new spreadsheet in Google Docs.

In your spreadsheet, you need three columns – campaign, ad group, and keywords. Every row of the campaign column should read “Exact Shopping.” Then, enter the ad groups and the only keywords that you want your shopping ads to be shown for in the ad group and keywords columns.

Finally, change the URL in the script on line 15 to the URL of your spreadsheet, and schedule the script to run once per day. The script will run daily and will add any search queries from the previous day that don't match your keyword list as negative keywords.

8. Not Knowing Your Customer Lifetime Value

One thing that surprises me when I'm managing e-commerce AdWords accounts is the number of advertisers who don't know their customer lifetime value. On average, 32% of customers will place a second order within the first year of purchasing from you, and 5.48% will purchase from you 6 times.

Furthermore, on average, the customer lifetime value is 46.2% higher than the initial purchase value. Of course, this will vary from industry to industry.

To maximize your PPC returns, you need to do two things. First, you need to maximize your customer lifetime value by adding upsells, encouraging purchasing multiple items using offers, and selling effectively using email campaigns, to name a few. By doing this, you can afford to spend more to acquire customers, and you can generate a lot more traffic to your website.

Second, you need to calculate your customer lifetime value. Once you know your customer lifetime value, you can better assess how much to spend on your paid search marketing campaigns, and you can scale your budgets accordingly.

Conclusion

Any of these 8 AdWords mistakes can have a significant impact on your ROI. So review your AdWords account and ensure that you're not making these mistakes. If you are, take positive steps to fix them.

Do you have any questions after reading this article? Just leave a comment below and we can discuss it.

About the Author: Wesley Parker is the founder of Clicteq. He is available to manage your paid search campaigns.