How to Optimize Your Bottom of Funnel for PPC

It would be nice if optimizing the bottom of funnel marketing in PPC advertising was as easy as waiting for visitors to flow through your earlier conversion strategies, but the reality is that you need to actively prioritize specific changes to convert visitors to the bottom of the funnel stage.

 On the bright side, small changes can really have a huge impact on your conversion successes at the bottom of your sales funnel. 

We spend so much time as marketers trying to influence new customers and clients by letting them get to know our story, services, and offerings. But what about the people who already know you—the ones who are already interested in your offerings and primed to make a purchase? These customers are already there at the bottom of the funnel marketing stage, and they’re waiting for you to reach them with an ad meant for them. 

By converting more of the customers who are already at the bottom of the funnel level of your strategy, your results will improve significantly. More importantly, you’ll set yourself up for success that is both sustainable and scalable when you have to update future PPC ad campaigns. 

What’s a Conversion Funnel?

To create a strategic marketing plan, you have to know your audience inside and out. This begins with knowing where different segments of your audience are at in their journey toward making a purchase from your business. A conversion funnel is a marketing strategy centred on actually visualizing the different levels your audience reaches on the journey to conversions.

 If you’re already running PPC advertising campaigns, whether or not you knew the name, you’re probably familiar with this concept! On a basic level, we all know that usually, it takes seeing and interacting with someone at least a few times before you trust them. It’s the same for advertising—it’s rare that someone seeing your business for the first time will be ready to make a purchase right away. 

As your audience moves from awareness to interest and desire before ultimately reaching the bottom of the funnel action stage, you can target those specific checkpoints with your PPC advertising in order to create impact and results. You lose visitors at each stage of the funnel, so it’s important to reach the right visitors initially, but more important to really target each stage of the visitor to get as many conversions as possible. 

What Are The Different Stages of a Conversion Funnel? 

The top of the funnel represents an audience who is unaware of your brand or business—this awareness phase is where users will initially learn about your business, who you are, and what you have to offer. Audience members in this part of the funnel might have visited your website, clicked on an ad, or visited your social media profiles. 

As users move to the middle of the funnel, they have more of an interest in learning more. At this point, you want to drive traffic toward maintaining that relationship through contact forms, details about what you have to offer, and even pricing options. 

The bottom of the funnel is arguably the most important step. The bottom of funnel visitors are ready to buy. At the bottom, users have learned about who you are and how you’re going to help them, and you have to appropriately guide them toward converting and making a purchase. By now, those visitors are using keywords that show their readiness to make a purchase, including terms like a discount, price comparison, coupon, sale, and where to buy. 

Without a well-planned bottom of the funnel strategy, the rest of your funnel won’t convert as effectively as it should. 

What Makes Bottom of Funnel Visitors Different?

Unlike visitors in the earlier sections of the funnel, the bottom of funnel visitors actually converts from an interested prospect to a real customer. PPC traffic engagement really spikes at the bottom of the sales funnel because users already know what you have to offer and who you are, and at this point, they’re specifically looking for what you have. 

To simplify things, let’s make this clear: users at the bottom of the funnel level are absolutely ready to take action with your business. The more bottom of funnel visitors you can convert, the better impact you’ll see on your campaign performances, especially if you’re strategizing with specific PPC metrics. 

Why ROAS Gains Are the Best

Instead of focusing solely on Return on Investment (ROI) targeting in your PPC marketing, you should really be strategizing to optimize Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) for tangible results of a specific ad campaign. 

ROI, which includes components like salary and operating costs within your business, and other top of funnel PPC strategies drive brand awareness and lead generation—ROI assesses your overall return on a campaign. But ROAS actually focuses on your specific ad spend to revenue ratio for each PPC campaign, which brings in conversions at the bottom of the funnel level. On a basic level, ROAS gives you a much more focused lens to view your digital ad campaigns. 

When you improve the efficiency of your conversion funnel as a whole–especially by optimizing the bottom of funnel strategies for conversions–you can increase ROAS without having to also increase your ad budget. Just so you know, with most PPC campaigns, a 3-4x ROAS creates profitability for the campaign. Your goal should be to grow beyond those numbers, but that’s a reasonable starting goal. 

How to Improve ROAs With Bottom Funnel Strategies

Your business is unique, so there’s no exact formula for the best strategies to use at the bottom of the funnel PPC marketing level. Even more unique are the individual offers you’re making. Someone who is at the bottom of one sales funnel is primed to make a much different purchase than someone at the bottom of another. Luckily, you can target users who are ready to act with a few effective strategies. 

Find The Best Keywords

For better conversions, you obviously need to change up your bottom of the funnel strategy for those visitors who are ready to buy. Focus in on keywords buyers usually use during the decision phase: words like comparison, review, discount, coupon, pros and cons. When you start with those basic, commonly used keywords, you can find long-tail keywords to target along the way. Overall, by targeting the right keywords for decision-makers at the bottom of your conversion funnel, you’ll be able to impress them throughout their search and reach them while they are making a decision. This will increase your conversions overall. 

Use Remarketing

The basics of remarketing are that someone visits your site, you capitalize on that visitor’s interest, and then target your advertising to reach them somewhere else. If a visitor to your Instagram page hops over to Facebook, you should have an ad ready to greet them so they can get to know your business. You can tailor your advertising to the bottom of funnel visitors in your conversion funnel, and appeal to where they are at in the buying process. Help them make the decision to go with your business by switching up your creative ad strategies and targeting.

Related: Why You Need to Know These Revealing Facebook Remarketing Statistics 

Branded Search

Branded search keywords show you when a user is looking for a specific brand or product, which obviously means they are a bottom of funnel visitor who is ready to convert. 

While most PPC campaigns include bids on branded search keywords, you can really target the bottom of funnel visitors with those bids because visitors searching for your business are already interested and ready to convert. Create specific landing pages and super-tailored ads to reach those visitors and help them make a decision. 

Create Ad Groups

This article has been chock-full of marketing acronyms, but there’s one more you definitely need in order to reach the bottom of funnel visitors effectively: SKAGS, or Single Keyword Ad Groups. Instead of having one ad group with multiple keywords, SKAGS are ad groups based around one keyword each. Here is where you’ll want to bring in broad match, broad match modifier, phrase match, and exact match keywords into the group. 

Broad match terms have high traffic potential, but you should use these sparingly—a fine-tuned, specific keyword list is much better for overall conversions. Broad match modifier terms are similar, but have specific required words indicated with a (+) symbol. Phrase match terms have required words, but have flexible words before and after those required keywords—you should be using these the most frequently in your marketing. Finally, exact match keywords in ads result in extremely targeted and relevant searches, but with far lower search volumes. You should use exact match keywords for your highest performing search queries. 

Use Negative Keywords

You can layer in negative keywords for your ad strategy to help alleviate unwanted clicks and impressions, which will help improve the quality of ad clicks. You can use negative keywords in specific campaigns and ad groups. 

For the bottom of funnel visitors, you can use both broad match and generic searches to help filter out the top of funnel users who are less likely to convert when they reach the bottom. 

Cart Abandonment

Who are the ultimate bottom of funnel users to target with specific PPC ads? Cart abandoners—they’ve gotten all the way through your conversion funnel, started to make a purchase, but ultimately didn’t finish. They represent an average ? of overall eCommerce customers. 

Abandoned cart visitors are the most important group to target with the bottom of funnel ads. Use specific and relevant ads to bring them back to your business and help them seal the deal—it’s a great ROAS investment for your PPC marketing.