3 Ways Conversion Funnels Improve PPC

A leaky funnel could get messy. (image source)

Watching your hard earned leads fall out of your conversion funnel before the sale can be a bit like using a noodle strainer to put oil in your car—nobody likes throwing money away.

When I have a multi-step process to a conversion/sale with my clients, I like to use a Google AdWords Conversion Funnel to find out what is happening with my leads during the sales process. This helps me get an understanding of what could be potentially making my leads leave early.

Here is how it works:

Link Your AdWords and Analytics Accounts

This isn’t covered in this post, but is important. If you don’t know how to link your Adwords and Analytics accounts, click here.

Setup Your Conversion Funnel

These screen-shots explain how to get to the ‘Goals’ section and set up your conversion funnels within Google AdWords/Analytics.

Once your conversion funnel(s) is set up,  you can now record at what stage of the funnel you are losing the most of your potential sales. A common issue I’ve been able to find with my conversion funnels are people dropping out of the sales process when asked to put in payment information. This is especially true on accounts that are offering a free trial in the ad, and then when the user goes to sign up for the free trial, they are required to put in a credit card. No bueno.

A conversion funnel will allow you to prove that the credit card page is perhaps the page where you are losing a large percentage of your leads, and then you can make a change to that page to improve conversions.

Here Are 3 Ways Conversion Funnels Improve PPC

1) Find The Hole

For Advertisers, we want to obtain leads at a cheap cost per acquisition. We’ve worked hard on our Search and Display ads to drive a good amount of low-cost traffic, just to see the lead slip out of the sales funnel at the last minute? I don’t think so. With a conversion funnel, we can figure out at what point our leads are dropping out.

2) Plug The Hole

We love to test things. Now that our conversion funnel is showing us at what step we are losing all of our leads, we can now test different methods on that ‘hole’ in the conversion funnel and try to get things to improve.

3) Keep Plugging

Like any good Search or Display campaign, nothing is ever 100% perfect. Just like when changing your oil, you’re most likely going to spill a little oil, your conversion funnel will probably always have a few holes. The idea here is to keep testing your weakest points in order to plug as many holes as possible. The more you find and plug, the better your conversions will be.

Just like your car needs oil to run smoothly, your business needs to revenue to keep going. Plugging the holes in your conversion funnel will insure you are getting the most from your marketing dollars. We believe in optimizing from click to close.