PPC and CRO Synergy: 6 Tips for Success

Paid Search Advertising (PPC) and Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) are both well suited to improving business performance in their own right.

However, taking it a step further and combining their insights can make them greater than the sum of their parts.

By sharing your findings between the two, combining paid search and CRO into one strategy, you can get the best results.

While they may be separate digital marketing campaigns, there is considerable overlap in their implementation.

Both incorporate extensive data analytics, analysing past account performance to make future predictions. They also rely on testing – experimenting with changes and leveraging success to improve your KPIs over time.

Most importantly, both PPC and CRO work primarily towards the same goal: conversion. This could be a call to your call centre, filling out a web form or buying a product you’re selling.

By combining these two digital marketing powerhouses, you can really help increase conversions.

The Power of a CRO

If you’re not already doing CRO, you really should be.

It’s designed to reduce ‘friction’ in the customer journey by making landing pages more user-friendly and relevant.

By making the path to conversion more engaging, CRO is one of the most powerful tools for improving digital marketing performance. One of my agency’s clients found that introducing CRO tactics alone increased conversion rates by 47%.

CRO is known to improve your PPC performance. That’s because an increase in conversions lowers your cost per conversion (CPA).

In other words, if your costs stay the same, but you win more conversions, you’re improving the efficiency of your spend.

You can also improve your Google Ads Quality Score if you use CRO to make landing pages more relevant to search ads.

This in turn lowers the cost per click (CPC) and improves spend efficiency – you’ll get the same number of clicks at a cheaper price.

The Power of PPC

This relationship can also work in reverse if you know how to apply your PPC insights correctly.

Paid search data revolves around who your customers are and what they’re looking for, so you should absolutely use this information to tailor their experience on your website.

Not sure where to start?

Here are my top five tips for incorporating your PPC insights into your CRO strategy.

1. Quality Score

You should first use the Quality Score (QS) information in Google Ads to decide where to focus your CRO efforts.

QS depends on a few key factors: expected click-through rate (CTR), relevance of the keyword to its ad group and the landing page experience.

The last one is the key here. Not only can you see quality scores broken down in Google Ads, but you can also add landing page experience as a metric.

This is Google’s measure of how useful and relevant the landing page on the final URL of the advert is to the user who clicked on it.

Look for keywords that have a high click-through rate but a low quality score; they may also have a low landing page experience score. This is because these keywords have been optimised for ad relevance but lack landing page quality or relevance.

With this information alone, you know their landing page needs improvement.

It won’t tell you what to change, but it will tell you which pages need improvement so you know you should prioritise your CRO testing and optimisation.

2. Keywords

As search queries trigger adverts through keyword matching, your keywords are an important indicator of customer intent.

By cross-referencing your keywords with the landing page that the final URL sends the user to, you can find further room for site improvement.

This involves assessing how well the landing page matches the search query that triggered the keyword.

For example, if someone searches for ‘buy red shoes’ and comes up with your exact match keyword, it’s most logical to send them to a page that only lists red shoes.

A page showing shoes of all colours will make it harder for users to find what they really want.

As a result of the drop, this page may affect your conversion rate: users may choose to look elsewhere rather than sift through irrelevant search results.

To make these pages more relevant to your keywords, you need to test copy and page changes.

Start by trialling keywords in your page copy to make landing pages more relevant, or consider targeting the final URL to a page that is pre-filtered for relevant products, as shown below.

The more specific the keywords, the more filters you can test to see how they affect conversions.

Please note: You may not want to filter based on the demographic characteristics of your customers.

Demographic information can be very helpful.

However, for some verticals (e.g. retail), users don’t always consider themselves when searching.

For example, directing a male customer searching for ‘buy red shoes’ to a page that is pre-filtered for men’s red shoes will make that landing page less relevant to men buying women’s or children’s shoes.

Other assumptions, such as size or price, may also limit conversions.

3. Advertising copy

It is well known in marketing that consistent messaging is key to building user trust.

Your keywords should be displayed in the advert copy in order to be consistent with the search query.

Ideally, you will also display these keywords and/or other elements of your ad copy on the page.

This may include aligning the search advert with dynamic web page titles, or repeating the call-to-action phrase again on your website.

If you’ve recently changed your ad copy based on A/B testing insights, this may also affect your conversion results.

Test these different avenues for improvement.

4. Demographics

While demographic features don’t always predict user intent, they can still inform tailored landing pages.

Google Ads provides a wealth of valuable data on how different audience characteristics perform in terms of KPIs.

This is especially true if you’re using smart bids – Google’s machine learning algorithms are sophisticated enough to provide a comprehensive understanding of which user characteristics predict high click and conversion intent.

Just as you can use audience profile data for targeting in Google Ads, you can also use this information to create a personalised landing page experience for

The most obvious examples are age and gender.

If the 18-24 year old audience group has a high click-through rate but tends not to convert, you can test advertising discounts or selling products on a personalised landing page for that audience group.

You may find that the price puts them off, or you may find that they don’t convert regardless of the discount deal because the product itself doesn’t interest them.

This will provide you with further insights to feed into your PPC strategy. Similar logic applies if this performance pattern applies to one gender and not the other.

You can also use Google Ads in Google Optimisation Tools Audience segments with purchase intent and audience segments with similar interests.

For example, if you sell hotel packages, test personalising landing pages for users with an intention to buy a budget holiday.

This could mean placing ‘Featured’ budget deals at the top of the page, or sending them to a landing page that is pre-sorted by ascending price.

5. Equipment

Another dataset to check is device segmentation: how do your conversions vary by device?

Historically, desktop has performed better, usually due to smaller packets with phone contracts, slower mobile internet speeds and poor mobile site optimisation.

Today, however, the majority of Google searches come from mobile devices. Therefore, mobile should be prioritised not only in your Google Ads campaigns, but also on your website.

This is especially true for retailers, as mobile and tablet users spend more on desktops than shoppers. A poorly built or optimised mobile site is essentially a waste of money.

If you have a lot of users visiting via mobile devices but few conversions, start testing to determine how well your site works on mobile phones.

Perhaps your buttons are too small when rendered on a mobile device and your site is too clunky for smaller screens?

Or maybe your site loads slowly on a 3G connection because you’ve failed to compress your images and CSS?

Combining your Google Ads device data with the contextual information you have about the typical customer journey will enable you to develop the most complete and effective test plan.

6. Location

The effectiveness of Google Ads can vary depending on location.

If you are a business with both online and offline conversions, you need to pay special attention to location variations when developing your CRO strategy.

You might consider testing variable ads and landing pages based on where the user clicks on the ad.

If the user is near a shop, you can highlight in-store offers or delivery options, such as free ‘click and collect’.

If your users are further away, test highlighting delivery speeds, any free delivery offers and online-only deals.

Working together

PPC insights bring valuable data about your visitors; the keywords they pass, the devices they use, their location – the list goes on.

These characteristics provide us with the context that users behave the same way when interacting with your website.

Using this data to customise their experience on your site will enable you to develop the most informed CRO strategy to improve the conversion journey of site visitors who come through paid search.

Because the relationship is reciprocal, investing the time and effort to apply your PPC data will drive continued growth.

Especially at this time of year, incremental growth in conversions can translate into huge revenue growth, and a lack of personalisation doesn’t satisfy anyone.

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