The Role That Online Reviews Play In Boosting Your Conversion Rates And Lowering Overall CPL
Nothing sells a product better than "word of mouth." It's a fact that most marketers know. With the onset of digital marketing, word-of-mouth endorsement has been swiftly replaced by reviews and testimonials. Over the years, online reviews have provided prospective customers with much-needed product validation and conversion rate anticipation. This has been particularly beneficial for LMS vendors with tight marketing budgets. LMS software buyers can help your revenue. All you need to do is start collecting customer testimonials from them to help increase conversion rates.
With a highly competitive online learning niche, LMS vendors can showcase their product in a directory listing with total confidence when it is backed by positive user reviews. This can get the ball rolling for you.
In This Guide, You Will Find...
- Difference Between Wide Reaching And Niche-Specific PPC Platforms
- Top 10 Benefits Of Advertising Using A Niche-Specific PPC Platform Like eLearning Industry
- How Do Online Reviews Differ In Premium Placements?
- Success Rate And Performance Statistics That Matter
- A Customer's Success Story After Creating A PPC Campaign
- How eLearning Industry’s PPC Platform Helps Your Online Reviews
- Potential Fraud Dangers You Can Run Into
- 3 Ways To Avoid Click Fraud On Your PPC Account
- How The eLearning Industry Platform Deals With Click Fraud
Difference Between Wide Reaching And Niche-Specific PPC Platforms
Okay. So, there are two types of PPC platforms. Wide reaching and niche-specific. One is for those who target big crowds, and the other is for those targeting an ultra-specific audience. But is this all that differentiates these two? Let us dig a little deeper into this. Here's a table depicting the difference between a wide ranging and a niche-specific PPC platform.
There is no better way to reach the right LMS software buyers than using an LMS PPC platform. The reason is simple: a niche-specific PPC platform has already built a niche audience. Of course, we're walking about LMS software buyers. Other wide and diverse PPC platforms will require manual, laser-focused targeting for each campaign to perform optimally. You can reduce PPC ad costs by starting your PPC campaigns within your niche.
eLearning Industry's niche-specific pay-per-click service gives LMS vendors the unique ability to attract clientele and produce better results. Νiche-specific PPC campaign strategies work even better when combined with the right content. This focused approach, coupled with optimal content marketing plans, can help LMS software buyers improve their conversion rates by a handsome 12%. But does it come easy? Well, only if you develop and implement a foolproof strategy.
Top 10 Benefits Of Advertising Using A Niche-Specific PPC Platform Like eLearning Industry
1. Targeting
Narrowly focused PPC networks are built on the premise of specificity. They are typically online communities or resource hubs/directories targeted at a very unique group of individuals. If you can find a PPC network that has accrued trust with your ideal buyer, you can deliver your value proposition to these buyers without the noise of other offers and search results clouding their judgment. And speaking of trust, online reviews and ratings make it easier for prospects to understand your value. That's why a PPC listing upgrade is necessary to shed light on your positive customer reviews.
2. Cost-Effectiveness
In the pay-per-click model, cost is incurred only when a user is directed to a website upon clicking its ad. With limited budgets, LMS vendors can benefit from PPC campaigns by placing strategic bids on countries and reducing CPC to suit their budget.
3. Immediate Effect
A well-executed PPC strategy will start showing results instantly. Marketers can check website rankings and expect a better position within hours of setting up a PPC campaign. However, immediate results are only good if they keep coming in regularly, and for that to happen, the campaign needs to be active. This is one reason why many marketers across the globe work on PPC ads before investing in other marketing channels like SEO or organic marketing.
4. Increased ROI
Since PPC has a proven track record of boosting traffic, increasing conversion rates, and ultimately accomplishing similar marketing goals under a set budget, it delivers an increased Return On Investment (ROI) each time.
5. Brand Awareness
Looking for ways to boost brand awareness? PPC can greatly help. A well-executed PPC strategy can work to a brand's advantage by making the right ads cross prospects' eyes and minds so they get to know about the brand. This, in turn, leads to more conversion opportunities, and the positive online reviews sweeten the pot further.
6. Conversion Rates
Naturally, more focused targeting is going to result in better conversion rates from your paid ad spend. However, there is another element that most niche PPC networks share: consumer intent. It's common for these networks to be seen on solution comparison directories. These are the places where people come to compare and contrast products and services. They are right at the bottom of the funnel, just ready to buy. This comes as an obvious benefit of advertising on a niche-specific PPC platform.
7. Timely Delivery
A unique characteristic of industry-specific PPC networks is that they deliver ads to prospects when they are most likely to buy. You can pay a little extra to upgrade your listing on these platforms and significantly boost your conversion rates. This will dramatically increase your LMS's chances of being noticed and getting the traction it deserves and desires.
8. Direct Comparisons
If you have a great product or service but are competing against some well-established brands with a much bigger marketing budget, industry-focused PPC networks can help you educate your ideal buyers about your unique selling point without leaking unnecessary money. The idea is to present a crystal clear comparison of your software with your competitor's, enabling the prospects to understand how your product may be their best bet.
Along with that, a niche-specific PPC directory campaign will help your LMS software get the attention it deserves. Holding a top LMS place on a list in a competitive market is vital to get prospects' attention. You can even place your nomination for eLI's Top List Awards.
9. Market Leadership
A focused PPC network or comparison website allows businesses to provide all the need-to-know information for prospects. You can also collect customer reviews for your LMS and build a profile of proof that your offer is the best on the market. This consumer-generated proof
establishes your business as a leader and breaks down the trust-building barriers of typical advertising platforms.
10. Effective Fraud Prevention
Unlike wide-reaching PPC networks, the eLearning Industry platform caters to a select few vendors operating in the eLearning niche.
How Do Online Reviews Differ In Premium Placements?
You can invest in a premium LMS directory listing in order to significantly boost your conversion rates. But, before you go for it, what exactly does a premium listing mean? For example, have you ever noticed how most pieces of software offer a free and a premium version? And how those two are distinguished? This works almost like that.
With a free placement, you get a product profile page, and users can read about your product, read the reviews, and compare it with your competitors' products. A premium placement will put you at the top. In simpler words, with a premium placement on eLearning Industry's PPC platform, your listing will be placed toward the top of the list (depending on your budget). However, a free listing will always appear after premium listings. Rankings depend on the number of reviews and ratings, which means the better the online reviews, the higher the ranking.
Success Rate And Performance Statistics That Matter
As you plan on investing in a niche-specific PPC campaign for your LMS, some questions may add to your worries. Is it the right decision? Does this thing even work? How well does it pay off? While answers to such questions are always subject to a number of factors, for an overall idea of how well this technique performs, you can have a look at the statistics.
Do you see how eLearning Industry's PPC platform is helping eLearning businesses gain traction? It works by significantly lowering the overall cost per lead (CPL) for the eLearning businesses investing in it. Clearly, there's a lot to digest, but you just need to start taking steps. One of those steps is leveraging reviews and ratings in eLI's LMS directory.
A Customer's Success Story After Creating A PPC Campaign
After signing up for our pay-per-click services, an LMS vendor experienced a low cost per lead of $26.43, with a high conversion rate of 12.58%. This happened due to the high number of product reviews (51). Validated online reviews from verified LMS software buyers established the product's credibility in the eyes of prospective customers, leading to a higher number of clicks and improved conversions.
This shows that with a decent number of reviews, LMS vendors can create a positive outlook for their product. And, if coupled with a strong PPC campaign, they can sell their products like hot cakes.
High Online Reviews Result In More Qualified Leads Than Those With Lower Or No Overall Ratings
The efficiency of any pay-per-click campaign, regardless of the platform it's being run on, depends upon its overall rating. This rating is an amalgamation of many aspects of your marketing efforts. And then, it's super important. Nearly 95% of potential buyers consider online ratings and reviews before buying. A recent eLearning Industry report says that vendors with high overall ratings (>65%) tend to attract more than three times the clicks/leads than vendors with lower overall ratings or no ratings at all. So, it's obvious that a clearly defined online reputation management strategy is essential.
A client using our paid advertising platform was able to acquire an overall rating of 90%. With such high online ratings, their PPC campaign was able to attract 6471 unique clicks, out of which 814 were successfully converted. That made a conversion rate of 12.58%, which the client maximized their marketing efforts toward, dramatically boosting their ROI. With the overall rating creating such an impact on your PPC campaign's success, it is obvious that online ratings are crucial for generating more leads as well as lowering CPC.
How eLearning Industry's PPC Platform Helps Your Online Reviews
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Listing Placement
Much like any pay-per-click platform, eLI's PPC enables you to place bids for your ads. The higher you bid, the higher your position will be in the listings. With a well-planned bidding strategy, you can improve your chances for potential LMS software buyers to discover your LMS.
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Campaign Insights
PPC strategies and campaigns are only as good as the data they produce. With a detailed reporting mechanism, campaign managers learn how their efforts have borne fruit. In-depth traffic and conversion reports will provide the required information to further streamline your campaign.
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Budgeted Spending
Any seasoned SaaS PPC agency will tell you that with strategic bidding, marketers not only gain an advantage over competitors but also control their marketing spend. A well-placed bid gets you the desired attention from interested LMS software buyers and improves your ROI. While paid promotion is a surefire way to get instant success, if coupled with intelligent content marketing ideas, the benefits can easily be multiplied. With eLearning Industry's Custom Content Plans, it becomes a win-win situation when you carry out content marketing and PPC at the same time.
Here's what you get if you opt for a custom content marketing strategy with eLearning Industry.
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SEO-Enabled Content That Drives Traffic
As we work to drive web traffic or conversions to your website or business, we also consider the need to create brilliant content that works for you in all arenas of marketing—be it for SEO strategies or social media. Having quality content on your website will add to its authenticity and place it higher in the search results.
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In-Depth Content Marketing Analysis To Surpass Your Competitors
It's a fact that an SEO competitor analysis matters a great deal to your business. While it may appear like you are prying into their websites, this analysis will give you an idea of what is working for them and what may work for your LMS pay-per-click campaigns.
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Highly Targeted Traffic To Your Sales Page
The major goal of any marketing campaign in the world is to sell. Whether it sells at the first stage of the marketing funnel or the last,
ultimately, it all comes down to selling. For this reason, it would be good to have a niche-specific PPC campaign strategy that can drive qualified web traffic to your sales and lead-capturing pages. This can dramatically boost your conversion rates as the traffic will be of the best quality.
Potential Fraud Dangers You Can Run Into
Bots And Malware
Bots are one of the most common malpractices used to attack PPC campaigns. In essence, nonhuman bots are programmed to imitate genuine traffic by clicking on a PPC listing. Doing so can potentially mess with the PPC budget for the campaign, effectively driving up the cost for you.
Click Farms
If you have been using the web for a while, you may remember coming across online earning opportunities that involve clicking on advertisements. These websites are known as click farms. The basic concept of a click farm is to get human users to click on ads in exchange
for a small fee. Since there is no intention of making a purchase, and the user is paid for simply clicking the ad, it hurts the conversion rate of the PPC campaign. If your website becomes a click farm target, the sudden surge in clicks can potentially drain your PPC budget without actually giving you any sort of results.
Hacker Activity
With the right knowledge, someone may have the ability to duplicate your PPC campaigns and run ads for their own benefit. And the more positive online reviews and success a company has, the higher the chances that someone might hack its PPC campaign. The twist is, for each click that is generated through this campaign, the charge racks up in your account, while another website enjoys the surge of traffic. This is quite a common occurrence on many PPC platforms. But at eLearning Industry, our enhanced PPC campaign management services have protocols, tools, and processes in place to prevent click fraud.
3 Ways To Avoid Click Fraud On Your PPC Account
1. Carefully Select Your Passwords And Keep Them Protected
The importance of a strong password cannot be emphasized enough. You are reminded of that on almost any website where you create an account, and eLearning Industry is no different. Easy-to-guess passwords are one of the leading causes of online fraud, including click fraud. Once someone with cruel intentions guesses your password, all they need to do is log into your account and use your PPC budget to their advantage. Apart from plain old guesswork, another common way for hackers to gain access to your account is by using spyware. For this reason, we recommend that you keep your devices protected by investing in leading security software.
2. Look Out For Phishing Attempts
While most website owners today are probably too smart to fall for common phishing attempts, phishers have become smarter. In many cases, it has been observed that users are sent an email stating that there is "urgent action" required on their account. The email features a link, which usually leads to a website that looks very similar to one they are familiar with. Once the user enters their login details, the phishers have access to their personal information, which they can use to their advantage.
To avoid these traps, you can take a few simple steps. Be very careful while responding to emails that ask for your personal or login information. If you receive an email containing a link to a familiar website, visit the website manually instead of clicking on the link. Do not enter your personal information on any website that seems suspicious. Phishers are getting better at making identical-looking webpages to trustworthy websites. Carefully examine the website's URL, along with the webpage, to make sure it is legitimate.
3. Stay Vigilant With Analytics
One of the most crucial PPC directory tips we can offer you is to pay close attention to your ongoing PPC campaign's performance. This is not just necessary to improve results, but it will also help you identify any unusual activity pertaining to your campaign. For this reason, it is advisable to routinely check your PPC campaign analytics reports. Don't just stop at identifying the IP addresses of unusual clicks. Dive deep into your analytics and understand which visits resulted in an action or, better yet, a conversion. If several visits from an IP address are registered without any activity, it is probably a fraudulent click and should immediately be brought to your PPC network's attention.
How The eLearning Industry Platform Deals With Click Fraud
1. Regular Audits Of Clicks
Since each click costs vendors money, we make it a point to carefully audit each incoming link. The PPC campaign data from all our partners undergoes robust manual checks to ensure no campaign is attracting illegitimate traffic that will provide no value to our partners. All invalid clicks are flagged and removed way before they can show up on the invoice.
2. Regular And Repeated Checks Of Analytics Reports
All analytics reports generated for each vendor's PPC campaigns undergo regular and in-depth checks to ensure there is no fraudulent activity that goes unnoticed. We make use of carefully selected fraud monitoring tools to identify and ban the sources of fraudulent activity on our website. Our tools help us flag and identify any sudden spikes in traffic, a surge of traffic from an irrelevant geographical area, incoming links from proxy servers, and much more. These checks are reverified after a period of 45 days to ensure no detail was missed and our vendors are protected from all forms of click fraud.
What our fraud monitoring tools can detect:
- IP addresses with a bad reputation
- IP addresses with known bots
- IP addresses running nonhuman scripts
- IP addresses providing known spoofed traffic
- IP addresses that are known as anonymous proxies
3. Fraud Activity Prevention With Rank Score
Each PPC marketing campaign on eLI's platform is associated with a rank score that allows us to tailor our fraud audit to each unique case. With this, we can track if the clicks on a particular campaign are unusually higher than the site-wide average. Similarly, depending on the performance of a campaign, we track the average (or maximum) conversions achieved by a campaign in a certain period of time. If this number suddenly changes, it becomes apparent that there is fraudulent activity taking place. Our tools also allow us to track duplicate and proxy IP addresses, along with days with no activity. Depending on the niche and the performance patterns of any campaign, we are able to set custom alerts for each of our vendors' performances.
Key Takeaway
It's clear that online reviews play a pivotal role in highlighting the value and trust for your company. So, you may start joining professional networking sites to showcase your expertise and generate new leads. The more leads you generate, the higher the conversion rates you enjoy, and the more people leave positive reviews. As a result, your PPC campaign is backed up tremendously.
Online reviews serve as social proof, building trust and credibility with potential customers. Positive reviews often reassure hesitant buyers, increasing the likelihood of conversion.
Reviews reduce uncertainty, address common objections, and provide real-world experiences, all of which can push a user further down the sales funnel, boosting the percentage of visitors who convert.
Strong ratings improve ad performance (e.g., higher click-through rates in Google Ads), enhance SEO, and boost organic traffic. All of them reduce the amount you need to spend to acquire each lead.
Popular platforms like Google, Yelp, Trustpilot, and product-specific review aggregators help maximize visibility. Tools like Yotpo, Feefo, or ReviewTrackers can automate review collection and display for better ROI.
Encourage satisfied customers to leave reviews through follow-up emails, loyalty incentives, or in-app prompts. Make the process easy and timely to increase participation and quality.
