Could You Increase Your Advertising Conversion Rates By Going Local?

Any seasoned advertiser using pay per click to generate more business from their website will have conversion rate at the forefront of their mind. Conversion rate is the percentage of visitors that came to your website and took action (phone call, purchase or lead form), which converted into a sale or lead.

For example, if you had 1000 visitors to your website today and 10 completed the online lead form that would give you a conversion rate of 1%.

To boost the return on your advertising spend, the goal is to increase the number of visitors' completing a lead form (conversion rate).

Our role as advertisers is to create plans and experiments from our experience, research and data analysis to continuously improve the conversion rate.

To give a flavour of what that may look like, I am using a real-world example from my Garage Door client to highlight some of the steps I took to increase the conversion rate.

A Regional Google Ads Campaign with a Local Feel

My Garage Door client covers a whole region of the UK and their website although super fast and converting well I felt could do even better with a few tweaks.

First assessing the currently targeted keywords, I was confident that this was on point and irrelevant traffic was minimal. Next, I evaluated the landing pages (where the person lands when they have click on the ad) and started to form a hypothesis.

Although brilliantly quick page loads and straightforward call to actions were in place, I sensed that it lacked a "local" feel that the target audience would prefer.

I backed up my theory by talking to the company's target audience and carrying out various research pieces to put a case forward to create a more local experience. I then produced a local landing page (with our trusted web developers) and ran an experiment for 30 days to measure the conversion rates' difference.

The stats speak for themselves:

• Average conversion rate before localisation test = 4.18%
• Average conversion rate after localisation test = 9.59%

I then rolled out this strategy across all the client's other branches and improved conversion rates, plus the leads' quality has also increased.

That's great, but how do I improve my conversion rates I hear you say!

As I am sure you will appreciate, every business is different and unique, which is fantastic for society, but that does mean there is no one size fits all strategy.

Just because going local suited the client above does not automatically mean it will work for your business. However, I would suggest starting off asking yourself / team a few questions to start coming up with your own theory on how to improve your conversion rate.

These questions include:

• What is my visitor journey like? Is it easy and fast? Or slow and cumbersome
• Who is my target audience? Does my website reflect this?
• Does my target audience prefer a large looking company or a more local feel?
• Are my telephone numbers national or local?
• Could I offer something of value for free to encourage take up?

There are so many more questions, and for this article, I have focused on the landing page experience, but there are many other areas you could investigate.

The core idea I hope you take away is to keep refining and researching, asking questions and experimenting with your theories – that will keep your conversion rates moving in the right direction.