Many businesses run paid advertising for a short while and deem it ineffective, assuming the channel, audience or other factor is not appropriate for them. Often campaigns get clicks and generate site visits, but the success ends there. Getting visitors to your site is only a fraction of the battle, converting them into sales is the key to true success and a positive ROI. 

Before spending your ad budget, take a step back to evaluate your assets and make sure your setup is optimal to help you reach your goals. Let’s assume that your goal is to generate leads and sales out of the paid ad traffic. Make sure that the visitors you acquire through ads have a good experience, find what they are looking for easily and are enticed to take next steps. 

Here are 2 things you should consider to ensure the money you spend on advertising does not go to waste:

1. Optimize your website

A good user experience and the way you present your business online is reflective of your brand. It can build credibility and trust, which is critical in the conversion process. To get your website campaign-ready consider optimizing the following components. 

Landing page 

If you are using content marketing, make sure the content on your landing page is compelling and as described in your ad. Be sure to provide information of value and include a call to action. If the ad talks about a specific offer, have a page ready with that exact offer, don’t make it difficult for the visitor to find the offer or to get more details about it. 

Clear, attractive and competitive offers

Make sure your offers are in line with the competition and that your pricing is simple and makes sense. For example if you are offering a 1 month, 6 month and 12 month subscription to your service, be sure that the offers with the longer commitment are cost effective and incentivise the visitor to commit to the longer subscription period. 

Easy to find information about product and company

Make it easy for your visitor to learn more about your products and services and why they should choose you over someone else. Your top navigation should be clear and simple and allow visitors to quickly find the information they might need to make a purchase. If your business has any level of complexity, anticipate questions that a customer midnight have and answer them on your website in an organized way. 

Well-designed

A beautiful design is impressive. But, sometimes most sophisticated designs do not translate into conversions. Focusing too much on gimmicks and personal taste and losing sight of your goal- leads and sales, is a mistake many businesses make. My suggestion is to keep things simple. Do some research on what design elements will get you the most conversions. There has been a lot of analysis done in this area and it doesn’t always match our instinct. On the flip side, your design should be modern and reflect today’s standard. 

Technically sound

Your site has to be responsive and mobile-friendly. Most people are visiting via mobile device, so that’s an absolute must.

Another critical factor is your load time. Ideally your website should not take longer than 2-3 seconds to load because load times any longer than that will cause about 40% of your traffic to abandon before reaching any content. Thus, the ad spend is a total waste for those seemingly impatient visitors. To put it in perspective, Amazon would lose $1.6 billion in sales a year if their site slowed by just one second. Hosting, image sizes, plug-ins, etc are some of the factors that could be impacting your site load speed. Evaluate your website set-up and find ways to cut load time. 

Additionally, make sure everything is linked correctly and everything functions properly on the site. Make sure that visitors are not getting any errors clicking through your website and that there aren’t any dead links. 

All of the above will not only improve your ad campaign results but also your SEO. 

2. Build a funnel

Invite visitors to enter your sales funnel and engage them to build trust, then nurture into conversion.

Make a connection

Conversions are not just sales. Often it takes more than one engagement to make a sale even in the simplest of transactions. It’s important that you give the visitor an option for a less committed engagement, such as a newsletter or promotional email sign-up, a free trial or way to sample your product/service, a demo sign-up, invitation to follow, etc. The objective is to begin a connection with the visitor. 

Engage and convert

Have a lead conversion program in place to nurture these leads into sales. So if you are collecting email addresses in exchange for a coupon be sure that you follow up and encourage the customer to use the offer. If you are getting people to sign up for a newsletter or to follow you on social, make sure you are putting out enticing content to engage those users and periodically presenting them with special offers to convert into sales. 

With a funnel in place your ad dollars will go much further.