Improving PPC Performance with Targeted Chat Rules

As great as pay-per-click (PPC) advertising can be for your business, sometimes it can drive you crazy!

After all, you pay for every click, so if you aren’t getting many new leads and/or sales from those clicks, PPC can be an expensive way to grow your business.

With that in mind, most online marketers are always looking for ways to get more conversions out of their current PPC traffic. At Disruptive, we spend a lot of time optimizing our clients’ campaigns for increased conversions, so we’ve figured out a few tricks that can really boost the effectiveness of your PPC marketing.

Targeted Chat Rules

One of the tricks we’ve been playing around with lately involves using Olark’s targeted chat rules to create specific chat prompts that are dialed into the exact reason(s) why people clicked on your ad.

We’ve seen great results with this approach and the idea was so compelling that Olark held a recent webinar dedicated to explaining how to use this tactic:

In this webinar, I covered the psychology behind our approach, how to best implement this tactic and some of the results that we have seen using target chat rules.

The Psychology

Often, as online marketers, it’s easy to forget that the best way to make a connection with someone is to talk to them.

As great as advertising is at getting people through the door, people don’t buy from you because you put together a great ad. They buy because they feel a connection to your business.

That connection may be as simple as “I need shoes and this online store sells shoes I like,” but no matter how simple or complex that connection is, people buy because they feel a connection.

And, the best way to make a connection is to talk to someone—which brings us to live chat.

Many marketers view live chat as a customer service tool, an extra call-to-action or an annoying interruption to the on-site experience. The truth, however, is that while live chat can be all of those things, it can also be an incredibly powerful tool for building connections with potential customers.

Implementing Live Chat Rules

The trick to using live chat to start a conversation is to create prompts that are relevant to the “what” and “why” that brought someone to your landing page.

The “what” is the keyword someone typed in that triggered your ad. If you’ve created decent buyer personas, you should know what sort of intent is behind the different keywords you’ve targeted and you can use that information to guide your chat prompt.

The “why” is the messaging that convinces someone to click on your ad and visit your site. To really craft a great chat prompt, your prompt needs to match the messaging of your ads and address the “why” that brought someone to your page.

For more specifics on this, I’ll let you watch the webinar itself, but to put it simply, a great, conversation-starting chat prompt uses what you know about your visitor (based your ad data) to break the ice and get people talking.

Now, all of this is well and good, but most companies have a lot of different “whats” and “whys” to their ads and messaging. That means you can’t create “one chat prompt to rule them all.”

How do you create chat prompts that reflect the keywords and ads that brought someone to your landing page?

This is where Olark’s targeted chat rules become very handy. Olark allows you to create specific chats that only trigger when your URL contains certain text.

Here’s how to set this up:

And…guess what? If you’re using UTM parameters in the destination URL in your paid search ads, you’ve got a built-in custom URL you can use to trigger your specific chat prompts!

Again, for more details, I’m going to refer you to the webinar itself, but the idea is fairly straightforward (feel free to let me know in the comments if you have questions).

Our Results

So, does this approach really help you get more conversions out of your existing traffic? Absolutely!

In our experience, a typical chat prompt on a PPC landing page has about a 1.8% response rate. A conversation-starting chat prompt, on the other hand, has a 7.2% response rate.

That’s 4x the chats!

In fact, if you aren’t using chat prompts yet, adding these targeted chat prompts will probably increase your conversion rate (leads, sales, etc) by 20%. If you’re already using generic chat prompts on your site, switching to this approach will net you up to 11% more conversions.

So, if you normally get 50 conversions from a page every month, adding target chat prompts could bump you up to 55 conversions. And that’s without spending a dime more on traffic!

Conclusion

As you might imagine, results like these are pretty exciting. Sure, it takes a bit of extra effort to get this set up, but if it turns a break-even PPC campaign into a winner, it’s worth it!

By the way, if this article and webinar have made you curious about what this approach can do for you, let me know here or in the comments. I’d love to take a look at your business and give you some ideas on how to implement this tactic.

What do you think of this approach? Does it make sense to you? Have you tried anything similar before?