Pay-per-click advertising can drive sales of expensive products for online retailers. These campaigns are often associated with low conversion rates and high cost-per-click. In order to capture the elusive higher price-point sale, you can adjust your PPC advertising strategy in several ways. Below are a few of these strategies.
Use Highly Relevant Landing Pages to Surprise Shoppers
The likelihood of an online shopper purchasing an expensive item without conducting thorough research is low. The longer the buying cycle, the more expensive the item. Therefore, most shoppers who click on your PPC ad will consider their visit to your site as one small step towards finalizing their purchase.
It doesn’t matter what you do, as long as you don’t surprise them. It is possible to design landing pages that are highly relevant and valuable to your potential high-ticket shoppers by considering their questions and needs. Here are a few examples.
- A unique description of the product;
- Advice from an authoritative source;
- There are multiple photos of the product;
- A video that highlights the product’s features in an interactive manner;
- Questions and answers that are commonly asked;
- Various product reviews;
- Obtain free reports;
- References and testimonials from reputable sources;
- Comparison of related products in a buyer’s guide.
It is important for some of that content to appear on the landing page itself, but not all of it must. In some cases, you can link to content outside of your site on the landing page, since the landing page is the main hub for shoppers to make purchases.
Your landing page should be so informative, relevant, and compelling that shoppers will buy right away. However, this best-case scenario is unlikely, as your landing page may not push shoppers through the buying cycle quickly.
Consider offering special promotions on your landing pages, or providing a high-value free report that will be emailed to shoppers, to capture their email addresses. With both Google AdWords and Microsoft AdCenter, you can set up “conversions” or “goals” related to activity that precedes a purchase. These events will allow you to gain a deeper understanding of your PPC campaigns and landing pages’ strengths and weaknesses.
Example: High-end Retailer of Home Decor
One of our PPC clients sells high-end home furnishings. In this sector, buying cycles are particularly long online, as shoppers become overwhelmed with options and suffer from analysis paralysis. On landing pages, we aggressively promoted new features on the site that allowed shoppers to request consultations, catalogs, and more information. We soon noticed many conversions from these forms, where shoppers provided their email addresses, mailing addresses, and phone numbers.
By following up with these shoppers by phone, the retailer’s sales staff has been able to close a number of very large deals. With some quick analysis, we were able to estimate the value of these non-sale conversions, and as a result, campaigns that once seemed unprofitable are now significant drivers of this retailer’s growth.
While most shoppers won’t give you their contact information, we can stay in touch with them anyway by deploying targeted remarketing campaigns that keep your brand at the top of their minds.
Remarketing ensures shoppers remember your brand when they’re ready to buy. Before making a big purchase, shoppers may leave your site to conduct more research. These shoppers are now aware of your brand since they visited your site and hopefully had a “surprisingly relevant” experience. However, that’s not enough. Shoppers won’t return to your site weeks after they first visited it because of “awareness,” but they will return to it because of “recall.” PPC remarketing campaigns help you accomplish this.
Remarketing Explained
In this example, let’s imagine Donna is a shopper visiting the site mentioned above. She is shopping for high-end décor. It was a surprising good site, but she wasn’t ready to make a purchase just yet. As she pulls up her favorite recipe website, she notices an ad for a coupon for the home furnishing website she just left.
Throughout the coming weeks, she continues to see ads for that particular retailer with highly relevant promotions related to the décor she wanted. Donna’s business is now more likely to go to the home décor retailer after the remarketing campaign than if it hadn’t been done.
A remarketing campaign within Google AdWords places cookies on a user’s computer when he or she visits key pages of a site that contains the code. All Google’s Display Network sites, including blogs, news journals, and more, will be able to read the cookie after the visitor leaves the site.
While users are researching, you can communicate with them using Image Ads. With this powerful advertising opportunity, you can reinforce your brand, promote your value proposition, and advertise special deals even when shoppers aren’t online.
For online retailers, remarketing is a great way to stay relevant throughout the entire buying process, while also giving shoppers a sense of your brand’s strength and credibility. During the buying process, your ads will cause shoppers to recall their experiences at your store, which will lead to higher sales.
Track Phone Calls, Too
You can measure the effectiveness of your PPC campaigns even more effectively by tracking phone calls. To optimize the conversion rate of high-ticket shoppers into buyers, you need to make yourself accessible throughout the entire shopping process. In order to win customers’ trust, you must also make yourself available offline.
A great way to leverage the basics of phone tracking without investing a lot of time or money is by using Google’s Call Metrics. Additionally, there are many paid solutions that provide robust call tracking, including caller ID, recordings, and ad campaign tracking.
You can track phone calls quickly, easily, and for free with Call Metrics, which is currently free within AdWords.
Enable Google Call Metrics in the Ad Extensions tab, where you can assign either a local or toll free number that Google links to one of your existing phone numbers at the campaign level. Therefore, if you have different campaigns to leverage different touch-points within the sales process, you can track which points generate the most calls, and adjust your tactics to take advantage of this. Within the campaigns tabs, you can add columns to show Total Calls, Missed, Received, Total Call Time, and Average Call Duration.
Your phone number will be displayed alongside your PPC ads, so it won’t affect the character limit on your ad text. You can use your ad text to qualify your traffic and help shoppers find you without visiting your website.
In order to serve the phone number Google assigned you within your web pages to shoppers who click on your ad, you can use Google’s Call Metrics. In other words, you can continue to track shoppers who have been referred to your site by your AdWords campaigns. You must implement three pieces of code on your site: (a) recognize PPC traffic; (b) decide what number to serve (default or Google’s); and (c) serve Google’s number when needed.
Since people can search and see the number at any time, you may receive calls at any hour unless you schedule your campaigns. You could harm your brand instead of bolstering it if you have rude or unhelpful operators on the phone. Make sure your representatives are friendly to your customers.
Conclusion
High-ticket sales are rewarding, but converting online high-ticket shoppers into buyers takes real commitment. In order to enhance your chances of success, you should design an intelligent funnel strategy, optimize your landing pages and product pages, use remarketing to create recall, and provide an open — and trackable — line of communication through Google Call Metrics.