Increasing Conversion Rates On Online Advertising

Image via pixabay

Image via pixabay

With each and every online ad that goes live, there lives a single purpose: increase conversion rates .

However, not every ad can boast with success. In fact online ads enjoys a tiny 0.09 percent click through rate. This is the main reason that online ads are said not to work anymore, but that’s hardly the case.

The truth is that most online advertisers fail to address four simple, yet fundamental matters:

  • Need – people don’t want or need the product advertised to them. In other words, it’s bad targeting.
  • Cash – consumers don’t have the budget for the product advertised, which essentially means bad targeting again.
  • Timeliness – they say you need to be at the right place at the right time to achieve success. Same can be said for online ads. If consumers aren’t in a hurry to get the product, they might just skip it for now.
  • Trust – The ad doesn’t seem trustworthy enough for people to click it.

It’s hard to do anything about timeliness (unless you possess the ability called telekinesis, which is hardly the case), but you can solve trust and targeting issues, and it’s not all about the advertising budget you have.

You have to go beyond just knowing and understanding your consumers. You need to start thinking like them to really hit that sweet spot and increase conversions.

Adding trust elements is another thing that you can do. Make it easy for consumers to verify the information you provide in your ad and show them that there are real people promoting the service or product mentioned in the ad.

People want to buy from people, not machines.

Besides solving those issues, there are a number of other useful things you can do to increase your conversion rates . Here is a short list of those.

Don’t be over persuasive

A problem that I see with a lot of online ads is that they are way over persuasive, screaming at consumers and demanding some action, while failing to provide enough trust and information.

For example text like “don’t hesitate, buy now!” doesn’t really provide any answers for consumers. Each consumer is hesitating before making a purchase and telling them not to hesitate isn’t the best idea. Instead, you could offer some proof, value and information in your banner ad that would help consumers to stop hesitating, rather than just telling them not to.

Address pain points

Each consumer buys a product or service, because he or she has a problem that needs a solution. Try to address questions like “what will I get if I buy this?”, “is the price comfortable for this product?”, “how will this solve my problem?” etc. with your ad to give the consumer enough reason to consider buying from you.

In other words, provide emotional value to your consumers.

If a buyer doesn’t find the answer to most of this questions with the help of your ad, chances are very slim that he or she will even be interested in the ad, let alone click it or make a purchase.

Show consumers that they are safe

Whenever there is a purchase, there is risk associated with it. For example if you order food, the risk is time. If you fail to deliver food within a reasonable time limit, then the whole point becomes worthless. Show consumers that their food will be delivered on time or offer something in return if it doesn’t. Text like “your pizza will be delivered in 20 minutes, or you can have your money back!” is a good solution to this problem.

Same can be said for other industries. If you are selling some sort of tech for example, the price and longevity are the risk. What you could do is offer a long term guaranty (ideally, as long as the specific product’s average lifetime is) to make your consumers feel safe.

Use psychology to your advantage

A lot of different researches proved that people can be “artificially” driven to make a purchase, especially when they have the need for the product. For example using elements of scarcity and time limitations can work wonders.

Amazon.com is a great example here. On most products, Amazon informs the potential consumer how many of that product are available in stock and if there are just a few left, it gives you the exact number, like “only 4 left in stock”.

Be exact with time limitations and scarcity of products, even if you have to go as far as showing a timer that’s ticking away minutes and seconds on your ad.

There are a lot of other ways to increase the conversion rates of your online ads, but in the end, in order to be successful they have to provide answers to the four main matters of consumers. There is no such thing as a wrong ad, it’s just wrong approach.

Tuan Nguyen
 

Tuan Nguyen is an entrepreneur and advertising expert. He is the proud owner and founder of 20 Dollar Banners and loves helping new businesses get the most of banner advertising.