How to increase traffic and improve conversion?

Keywords such as short videos, content first, data-driven, AI artificial intelligence, and scenario marketing are flooding the entire marketing industry. As online marketing channels become more diversified, SEM bidding promotion is still one of the promotion methods that companies can use to generate high returns with high spending.

After so many years, companies can be said to have a love-hate relationship with SEM bidding promotion. SEM bidding promotion has incomparable advantages: large user base, wide coverage, high activity, strong autonomy and operability, and promotion strategies can be adjusted at any time according to actual conditions. Without the correct promotion strategies and techniques, SEM bidding promotion is almost a waste of money. Moreover, as competition intensifies, Baidu bidding traffic becomes more and more expensive, and the increasing customer acquisition costs become a permanent pain for companies.

In order to improve the effectiveness of SEM bidding promotion, Manlang Planning believes that companies must first have an accurate understanding of SEM bidding promotion: the essence of SEM bidding promotion is to spend money to buy traffic, convert through traffic, and thus make profits. Spending money is inevitable, but we need to know what the company needs at this stage. Manlang Planning believes that if a company is in its start-up phase and has no traffic, how can it talk about conversion? At this time, the goal should be to attract accurate traffic at low cost. If it is in the development and mature stages, the focus should be on improving conversion. Next, let’s talk about how to do these two aspects:

Attract accurate traffic at low cost

Increasing traffic is not simply about increasing the budget, expanding the matching mode, raising the keyword bid, etc., but about locking in the target user group, increasing accurate traffic, and eliminating junk traffic.

1. Keyword selection

What netizens search for indicates what kind of demand they have. If the budget permits, the selection of keywords needs to cover the potential user groups as much as possible on the one hand, and accurately target the target user groups on the other.

Keywords are generally divided into: brand words, competitor words, generic words, product words, event words, etc. According to Manlang Planning's experience, the conversion effects of brand words, product words, and event words are generally better than competitor words and generic words. Companies can choose precise keywords based on the characteristics of their own products or services and refer to the conversion effects, and abandon overly broad keywords. After a period of testing and promotion, Manlang Planning can help companies extract keywords that can truly generate conversions for users based on data statistics and analysis. These keywords can be used as an important strategy for SEM bidding.

These are not enough. The ones mentioned above can only ensure that the conversion costs are controllable. So how can we maximize cost savings while ensuring conversion? Nancy, chief analyst at Manlang Planning, believes that the mining of long-tail keywords can greatly reduce the cost of acquiring customers for enterprises, and through user usage scenarios, more keywords with low traffic and low prices but very accurate can be mined.

If the CPC of your account remains high and the cost of words that can bring conversions is also high, it means that the keywords in your account are very similar to those of your peers. Everyone is competing, so it is normal for the cost to be high. In this case, you need to work hard on word selection. First, find some accurate long-tail words that your peers have not discovered. After they can bring conversions, lower the bids for high-cost words or simply give up on them. The judgment criterion is whether it will affect the number of conversions of the entire account. If you find that 5 accurate long-tail words can bring the same number of conversions as high-priced words, then decisively stop using the high-priced words.

Some people may say that they can’t find effective words with less competition. Manlang Planning believes that in the current market environment of information explosion and severe media fragmentation, netizens’ search needs are becoming more and more personalized. After screening a large number of excuses, we will definitely be able to screen out long-tail words with very low conversion costs.

2. Negative Keywords

During the SEM bidding promotion process, there is some invalid traffic. At this time, negative keywords need to be added to eliminate junk traffic that consumes budget but has no conversion. Companies can set search terms that are irrelevant to their business and competitor terms with low conversion rates as negative keywords to reduce the number of visitors who just browse around and avoid wasting budget on invalid traffic as much as possible.

(There are 4 keyword matching modes in Baidu SEM accounts: broad match, phrase match, subtle match and negative match. Different matching modes will bring different results. Broad match impressions > phrase match impressions > precise match impressions. Negative match can help companies filter out unnecessary impressions that do not bring results.)

According to the promotion conversion funnel, we know that the more clicks, the better the promotion effect is not necessarily the case. The key to the promotion effect lies in the conversion rate. In order to facilitate future orders and improve conversions, it is necessary to know at which funnel level the company's current promotion has a low conversion rate so that targeted improvements can be made.

Increasing traffic is not simply about increasing the budget, expanding the matching mode, raising the keyword bid, etc., but about locking in the target user group, increasing accurate traffic, and eliminating junk traffic.

Manlang Planning’s commonly used method is to first substitute each level of the conversion funnel into the company’s historical promotion data, calculate the conversion rate from each level to the next level, compare it with the industry average to determine whether optimization is needed, find out the points that need to be optimized, and then determine where to start optimizing based on the factors that affect the conversion effects of each level.

As shown in the figure below: If the conversion rate from consultations to orders is low, it is necessary to effectively improve the sales team's sales conversion capabilities to improve overall conversion. If the conversion rate from visits to consultations is low, it is necessary to improve the quality of website content, the relevance of keyword creative landing pages, and the convenience of internal website interaction to improve the overall effect.

Improving traffic quality through keywords requires companies to accurately grasp the psychology of the target audience. Users will learn about a company's products or services by searching for different keywords. Behind each keyword lies the user's search intent and purchase intention.

Author: Manlang

Source: Manlang (manlangcehua)