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Your Google Ads average conversion rate plays a significant role in the overall success of your eCommerce business. Keep reading to learn more about this critical statistic and how to increase it.
Google Ads delivers ads to specific audiences based on what they search. Your chosen keywords, ad copy, and ad bid all determine if the user clicks your ad.
From there, the user reaches your landing page or website and may become a customer. If they become a customer, that event is called a conversion — converting them from a visitor into a customer.
Your conversion rate is a percentage of how many visitors become a customer. Below, the Varos dashboard shows how your conversion rate (CVR) stacks up to your industry peers to help gauge the success of your Google Ad campaigns.
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Cost per conversion is an important metric to track and understand. It’s closely related to your conversion rate, and keeping their relationships in mind helps maximize your marketing efforts.
In the context of Google Ads, your total ad spending and conversions for the given period determine your cost per conversion. The tips we’ll explore later on to improve your conversion rate will also bring down your cost per conversion.
Understand your CPC compared to your competitors to understand where you stand. Are you spending too much? Or outpacing your peers? Using Varos will make sure you’re always aware of the entire story:
What exactly is a reasonable conversion rate for eCommerce? You can look at your own past; any improvement can be considered good. However, for a more accurate assessment, you should look at the results of other eCommerce businesses.
A recent study found the average Google Ads conversion rate for eCommerce is 4.40%, while the average cost per conversion Google Ads is $45.27. However, you need to consider specific industry averages for an accurate comparison.
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Comparing your conversion rate to the overall average doesn’t give you the entire picture. Every industry has its own motivating factors, price points, and hurdles that impact conversion rates.
Looking at the average conversion rate by industry highlights why you need accurate benchmarks to truly understand your campaigns' success.
Focusing on the industry average eCommerce CVR gives you a much more accurate picture of what you should strive for in your own campaigns.
For example, if you’re in real estate but strive to reach the overall CVR average, you may believe your campaigns are failing when they might surpass your competitors.
Having the right benchmarks is vital to gauging your success. Varos helps you easily benchmark your vital metrics against your peers.
How exactly do you find your Google Ads CVR? The overall formula is:
Conversion rate = (conversions / total visitors) * 100
You can typically set up a conversion event and specific user tracking to automatically calculate your CVR, depending on your analytics platform. However, you can use the above formula when necessary or double-check the results of your analytics platform.
It’s also worth noting that ‘conversions’ in the above formula can be any event you designate as a conversion. For eCommerce businesses, that will typically be a sale. However, it can also be an email subscriber, social media following, or anything else determined by your core business goals.
Improving your conversion rate doesn’t mean spending more on ads; instead, you’ll make strategic changes to earn more customers from the same ad spend. Let’s review how you can improve your Google Ads conversion rate today.
Every ad campaign should send traffic to a specific landing page, with rare exceptions. Build landing pages designed to work with your Google Ads. For example, if your ad promises a discount on your high-value product, make sure traffic is sent to a landing page with details about the discount.
Landing pages should be distraction-free, focus on the benefits of your product, and have clear calls to action, so visitors know what to do next. Building or enhancing landing pages is a powerful way to convert traffic into customers without spending more on ads.
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Calls to action (CTAs) are the parts of your marketing campaign that motivate customers to take the step, or action, towards becoming a customer. They can be links, buttons, pop-ups, or anything else encouraging the user to take the next step.
CTAs are within the ads themselves and throughout the rest of your marketing campaigns until after a visitor becomes a customer. Evaluate every CTA throughout your conversion funnel. Explore how it can be improved to persuade the visitor to take action. You may even wish to hire a copywriter to craft compelling CTAs.
Using negative keywords is one of Google’s recommendations for improving your conversion rate. You’ll be able to focus on only the right users, which means sending more qualified visitors to your eCommerce site to become customers.
A negative keyword is a specific word or phrase that indicates your ad should not be displayed. Google’s example is the word ‘free,’ which companies use as a negative keyword unless they offer a free trial or product.
You can use negative keywords to cut out situations where your ad is being shown to the wrong audiences. You pay for every click, so making sure those clicks are from qualified leads can improve your CVR and decrease your cost per conversion.
Most Google Ad campaigns can be improved, so it’s important to frequently test your ads' variations. These variations can cover anything related to the ad, such as a slight change in verbiage to target different keywords.
However, you need to give each variation time to produce results before declaring it a success or failure. Depending on your business, two weeks to a full month is likely necessary to fully understand if your change is a meaningful improvement.
Additionally, you should only test one variation at a time. If you change the ad copy and target keywords simultaneously, you won’t know which change makes the difference in your CVR.
Setting up conversion tracking is one of Google’s primary recommendations for improving your conversion rate. Google Ads includes the capability to take the heavy lifting off your plate while improving the accuracy of understanding the effectiveness of your campaigns.
Automating this process might not seem like it directly improves your CVR, but quickly understanding what works and what doesn’t helps you make the above changes. You’ll prevent yourself from over-investing in ineffective campaigns, understand when to change CTAs, and consider adding negative keywords faster than relying on manual methods.
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Understanding your own average conversion rate for Google Ads is essential, but it’s only half the story without the right context. Benchmarking your Google Ads CVR against your competitors helps you truly know if you’re leading the pack or falling behind. Then, you can re-adjust with the above tips and measure the results.
Varos makes benchmarking your CVR against your peers more accurate than relying on sporadic reports. Our dashboard shows you exactly how you compare against your competitors with frequently updated data.
Below, you can see specific results for Google Ads conversion rates as compared to your peers over time. As a result, you’ll be able to quickly determine how you’re doing against others facing the same industry-specific conditions to truly gauge your success.
Are you ready to unlock real competitive analysis for your eCommerce business? Get started for free, or request a demo today.
About the Author
Yarden Shaked
Co-founder & CEO at Varos
Learn how to beat out your competition on TikTok. We've analyzed thousands of TikTok ads accounts and discovered what the best are doing.
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Bottom line: I’m recommending Varos to you all because it’s FREE (for now) and it’s already added a ton of value for myself and my clients.Check it out 👇
I would definitely recommend checking out Varos. With Varos you can easily see how your peers are performing, for free. You get insights into not only TikTok Ads benchmarks, but also similar data for Facebook Ads, Google Ads, and more. #VarosAmbassador
Varos allows thousands merchants to upload anonymize marketing data across meta and google and aggregating it to show what the average is across different categories and ad spend
With varos.com, I can see exactly how our performance across channels stacks up against our competitors in our space.
Compare your ad performance to benchmarks of companies just like yours, anonymously.
I would've killed for this tool years ago and now it's here and oh it's free. Amazing.
I've been seeing some content about @Varos_com so we decided to check it out.
One underrated feature of theirs is the Shopify Benchmarking, which is FREE btw.
Literally impossible to access this data anywhere else. Check out what we're seeing at @my_obvi 👇
I'm loving what @Varos_com is doing with providing much more relevant benchmarks for #ecommerce... especially since it shows that we are absolutely DOMINATING @Elumynt on #facebookads!
This is in the Baby and Children vertical.#fbads #ppcchat #retail #dtc
Bottom line: I’m recommending Varos to you all because it’s FREE (for now) and it’s already added a ton of value for myself and my clients.Check it out 👇
I would definitely recommend checking out Varos. With Varos you can easily see how your peers are performing, for free. You get insights into not only TikTok Ads benchmarks, but also similar data for Facebook Ads, Google Ads, and more. #VarosAmbassador
Varos allows thousands merchants to upload anonymize marketing data across meta and google and aggregating it to show what the average is across different categories and ad spend
With varos.com, I can see exactly how our performance across channels stacks up against our competitors in our space.
Compare your ad performance to benchmarks of companies just like yours, anonymously.
I would've killed for this tool years ago and now it's here and oh it's free. Amazing.
I've been seeing some content about @Varos_com so we decided to check it out.
One underrated feature of theirs is the Shopify Benchmarking, which is FREE btw.
Literally impossible to access this data anywhere else. Check out what we're seeing at @my_obvi 👇
I'm loving what @Varos_com is doing with providing much more relevant benchmarks for #ecommerce... especially since it shows that we are absolutely DOMINATING @Elumynt on #facebookads!
This is in the Baby and Children vertical.#fbads #ppcchat #retail #dtc
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