3 Top Strategies to Boost Your Pay-Per-Click Conversion Rate

You’ve spent all this money on a website, and now you're reading or learning from your marketing team that it's a good strategy to develop landing pages to optimize your Pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns.  PPC ads are super effective at driving more traffic to your website. It might surprise you (or annoy you), but sending “paid” traffic to a homepage isn’t always the most effective for your conversions.

Homepages are primarily designed to showcase your entire practice. It’s the full monty. When prospective patients are searching online and click on a pay-per-click ad, they have very specific intent and goals in mind. Behaviorally, they are more ready to take action than your standard organic website visitor.

You might be thinking, “How can I get more visitors to my landing page or website? How do I make the most of my PPC budget? And once I get more visitors, how can I get a greater number of them to become my patients?”

By developing a dedicated web page that focuses on a specific call to action, a landing page, and adding targeted copy, graphics, and video, we’re hoping to perfectly match the searcher’s intent, improve conversions, and reduce the cost of our cost-per-click campaigns. 

The creation of pay-per-click (PPC) advertising has helped many eye care practices answer these questions with substantial increases in sales of both products and services. Those increases, though, may level off at some point, raising the next logical question: “How do I increase my conversion rate?” 

Across all industries, the average conversion rate is 2.35%. Though you may be hitting the average conversion rate, by no means are you required to settle for it. The first step to improving your conversion rate is to know what it is. Calculate your current conversion rate by dividing your total number of conversions by the number of generated ad clicks. Next, multiply that amount by 100. The result is your conversion rate. 

Now, it’s time to set more ambitious PPC goals. Here are three top strategies to boost your pay-per-click conversion rate: 

Choose the right keywords

The words you use to describe your products and services are critical in attracting patients to your landing pages and maximizing your conversion rate. If you sell contact lenses, for example, don’t think that the keyword “contacts” will be enough to earn a high conversion rate. Your prospective patients aren't searching "contacts" in Google. So, it won't be enough to have just "contacts" on your practice website's landing page.

When customers are close to making a purchase, they tend to search using long-tail keywords, which are longer, more specific keyword phrases. Test an ad that uses long-tail keywords as well to further refine your product’s or service’s description. For example, expand “contacts” to “rigid gas permeable contact lenses under $50” or “disposable contact lenses under $50.” The more closely the description of your product or service matches the customer’s search terms, the more likely the customer is to find you and purchase from you, boosting not only your conversion rate but also your bottom line. 

Optimize your landing page

The job of the landing page is to persuade the customer to take the desired action, such as making a purchase or booking an appointment. That’s why it’s vital that your landing page includes all of the components that encourage conversions – a strong CTA, easily located buttons, educational content, and super clean and minimal design. 

You should have a clear goal for your landing page and every aspect of it should be geared toward serving that goal. Once you identify the action you want visitors to take, i.e. getting an email, setting an appointment, buying contact lenses, or buying frames, design the landing page to encourage that action. 

High-quality images on your landing page can encourage visitors to purchase products and services. Achieving that level of quality might mean skipping the stock-image suppliers and cookie-cutter landing page templates. Instead, you could hire a professional photographer and an experienced web designer to create customized photos and landing page designs, respectively, to your specifications.  You should also tap into your optical, contact lens, and equipment vendor representatives for artwork and other digital media assets. They have entire design and web teams on staff and will be more than happy to assist your practice.  

Hiring a skilled copywriter, with landing page experience, to write custom-crafted content will make your landing page fresh, vital, and unique. In addition, it will allow you to tailor the content to your specified goal and carry through the ideas behind the PPC campaign. Make sure the content promotes the benefits that your products and services provide to your customers.

A customized approach will ensure that all elements of the landing page – both visual and written –support your brand and your practice goals. 

If you’ve got more than one PPC offer, create a separate landing page for each one. Multiple offers sharing one landing page will only confuse visitors and drive them away. 

Resist the temptation to write long headlines. Keep headlines brief, easy to read, and effective. Use a large font size and aim for six to twelve words. 

It’s also important that your landing page loads quickly. A slow-loading page encourages visitors to search elsewhere for their products and services, and this will reduce your conversion rate. 

If you put a form on your landing page for visitors to complete, it’s very important that the form be easy to fill out. Most importantly, it should be brief. A lengthy form can deplete a visitor’s patience quickly and drive them away in search of an easier, less frustrating source for the products, services, or information they seek. 

Test your landing page design with A/B split testing to identify the combination of elements that motivates the highest percentage of visitors to take the desired action.

This optimization technique might be too advanced for some readers to implement on their own.  Ask your web team about this technique.  They’ll be impressed.  Maybe they offer it to you already, but you turned it down for cost reasons. Don’t! In the long-run, you’ll save a lot more by having optimized campaigns.  This single action, albeit tedious at first, takes the guesswork out of the optimization equation. Think of it as evidence-based marketing. In addition, your web development team might offer other landing page optimization tools like user session replay and heat mapping to see what users are clicking on the most and the least.

Offer an Incentive

The opportunity to receive a lower price, a bonus, or a freebie is just too appealing to pass up. Special offers, coupons, and discounts entice customers, and this tried-and-true technique is a key component of successful PPC advertising. If you don’t provide a compelling reason for the customer to click your ad and land on your page, then the time, effort, and expense you’ve poured into your PPC campaign has been wasted. 

A great offer can do wonders in raising your response rates and conversions, but make sure you don’t undermine your efforts by attracting the wrong clientele. You can easily attract frugal customers, who take you up on your offer and then move on, rather than forming a long-term relationship with you. The result is a spike in your conversion rate, yes, but one that’s ultimately devoid of value, and value is the benefit to you as the practice manager or owner. Combining value with an attractive offer means you not only boost your conversion rate in a substantive way, but you also lay the foundation for an ongoing relationship with that patient.

It may take some experimenting to find the offer that generates a lot of conversions, but keep in mind that you don’t necessarily have to create a whole new offer to find the winning formula. Simply changing a CTA, word, or phrase in your existing offer may be all it takes to find success. 

As a practice, it's good to be familiar with this information about boosting pay-per-click conversion rates, even if you plan on hiring an SEO or marketing company to manage your PPC campaigns for you. The core of a PPC campaign is to map your PPC strategy around your patients’ wants and needs and keep optimizing until you exceed the industry average. Don’t accept industry-standard conversion metrics. You already offer quality, trustworthiness, and expert services. Don’t let a non-tailored PPC approach hold your practice back.