PPC and CRO: The Perfect Pair for Higher Conversions & Lower Costs

Today’s digital landscape is very complex and highly competitive. Many businesses come to us with the same problem  – their digital advertising costs are out of control.

It’s no mystery why.

Increased competition, market saturation, and economic downturns have pushed ad prices to unprecedented heights, squeezing profit margins and straining marketing budgets.

When faced with this challenge, marketers will have two options going forward:

1. Increase your advertising budget even further.
2. Make your existing traffic work harder by converting more visitors into customers.

Our clients who chose the second option have saved hundreds of thousands of dollars. The impact on their bottom line has been nothing short of transformative.

Let’s dig a little deeper and explore why CRO has become an essential strategy for anyone running PPC campaigns. Keep reading to know why PPC and CRO should always go together.

What’s CRO and PPC?

CRO and PPC represent two sides of the digital marketing coin – each powerful on its own, but truly transformative when used together.

What is Pay Per Click (PPC)?

Pay-per-click (PPC) is an advertising model where marketers pay a small fee each time when someone clicks on their ads. 

Unlike traditional advertising channels where businesses pay a fixed amount for exposure, PPC only charges you when a user takes action by clicking through to your website.

It’s a way of ‘buying’ visitors as opposed to ‘earning’ them organically.

Wonder why you see those sponsored results at the top of search engines like Google or those targeted ads on Facebook? That’s the power of PPC campaigns.

The goal is to bring qualified potential customers to your website.

For example, a SaaS company offering software products and analytics solutions can run PPC ads targeting users searching for terms like “increase conversions,” “higher conversion rates,” “conversion funnel,” or “analytics platform.” Advertisers bid on these keywords, and their ads appear on top of the search engine results page.

Google Ads (formerly AdWords) is the most popular and widely used PPC platform out there. It displays ads at the top of search results for specific keywords.

However, PPC is not just limited to search engines. It also includes social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn as well as display networks that place banner ads across thousands of websites.

Why is PPC important for businesses today?

PPC has become an indispensable tool due to its effectiveness in targeting the right audience. Here’s why PPC matters today:

• Measurability: Every aspect of a campaign can be tracked and optimized – from impressions and clicks to conversions and return on ad spend.
• Targeted Advertising: With a well-structured PPC campaign, you can target specific demographics, locations, times of day, and even devices. 
• Immediate Results: Unlike organic search optimization, which could take months to show results, a well-structured PPC campaign can put you in front of potential customers within hours of launching.
• Flexibility: You can control your monthly advertising budgets and bid amounts. This ensures your campaigns align with financial constraints.
• Brand Exposure: Even if users don’t click on the ads, your PPC campaign can increase brand awareness through repeated exposure. This allows you to maintain a competitive edge.

As more consumers shift towards online platforms, businesses that leverage PPC effectively can tap into limitless opportunities to grow and thrive in competitive markets.

What is Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)?

Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is a data-driven marketing strategy for increasing the percentage of people (new/returning users and general sessions), who complete a desired outcome – whether that’s making a purchase, signing up for a newsletter, downloading a resource, or completing a form.

Unlike PPC, which focuses on acquiring traffic, CRO focuses on maximizing the value of that traffic.

It’s a data-driven approach that combines analytics, user feedback, and testing to identify potential barriers to conversion and implement solutions that improve user experience.

CRO is about understanding what happens after visitors arrive at your website and working to remove obstacles to create smoother paths to conversions.

Here’s a small example to help you understand better:

Let’s say a project management SaaS company receives substantial traffic from their PPC campaigns through landing pages, but only 2.3% of visitors sign up for their free trial. Through funnel analysis and session recordings, they discover that many visitors reach the signup form, and start filling it out, but abandon it when faced with too many required fields.

Now, the CRO team creates multiple versions of an improved signup flow, including one with fewer fields, another with a progressive form that reveals questions gradually, and a third that allows users to sign up with single-click social authentication followed by personalization later.

Through A/B testing they found that the simplified social signup version increased trial signups by 31%, which raised their overall conversion rate to 3.01%.

Although it seems like a small improvement, it represents a 31% increase in trial users from the same amount of traffic. For a SaaS business spending $50,000 monthly on PPC ads alone, this could mean hundreds of additional qualified leads and potentially dozens more paying customers each month.

This example perfectly illustrates how small changes to signup pages can dramatically improve your conversion rates. This connects directly with our detailed analysis of SaaS signup pages, which explores best optimization practices for creating visually appealing and effective SaaS signup pages.

Why is CRO important for businesses today?

CRO is a critical part of maximizing your revenues. With the right CRO strategies, you can improve your customer experience, minimize acquisition costs, and make every penny work harder. Here’s why it is crucial for business growth:

• Improved Customer Insights: Helps you find the right people and prioritize quality over quantity. CRO analytics can help businesses identify and understand their target audience better. It allows them to make informed business decisions based on data.
• Better ROI: It makes the most of your existing resources, through extensive analysis of existing efforts – maximizes revenue.
• Scalability: Allows you to expand your business and increase revenue without needing to constantly acquire new customers at a large scale.
• Improved User Experience: Allows you to create a smoother customer journey by focusing on UX improvements. This can lead to higher satisfaction and increased customer loyalty.
• Adaptability: A well-structured CRO strategy allows you to adapt to evolving market conditions and user behavior. This ensures your website remains relevant and effective.

At its core, CRO is about making your website work harder for you by turning more of your existing web traffic into leads (customers).

Why PPC Alone Isn’t Enough?

Paid advertising is only half of the battle. In fact, many businesses struggle with getting their PPC campaigns to yield the desired ROI. PPC campaigns are indeed very effective in bringing traffic to your website, but they represent only half of the equation.

When you focus solely on increasing traffic through PPC without optimizing your conversion funnel, you’re essentially paying premium prices for visitors who may leave without taking action.

Most importantly, PPC alone can’t tell you why visitors aren’t converting. You might know that certain keywords perform better than others, but without CRO research and testing, you won’t be able to understand what’s preventing conversions or how to fix these issues.

Here are some reasons why relying solely on PPC is not enough:

• Budget constraints become growth barriers: As industries become more competitive, PPC costs inevitably rise. Many businesses find themselves hitting a roadblock where they simply cannot afford to purchase more clicks at high prices. Growth becomes financially unsustainable as you pay more for the same results.
• Results drop when campaigns pause: Unlike owned media assets that continue working for you, PPC traffic stops the moment your campaigns hit a snag. Whether you’re stopping due to budget constraints or strategic shifts, your visibility drops overnight.
• Surface-level customer relationship: PPC ads focus on driving immediate clicks but often fail to build deeper brand connections. Without optimized landing experiences that communicate your unique value proposition and build trust, visitors may click but lack the confidence needed to convert.
• Vulnerable to invalid traffic: Not every click is an opportunity to gain a potential customer. Competitors, bots, and fake clicks can eat your budget without providing genuine conversion opportunities.
• Keyword limitations create blind spots: PPC targeting is only as good as your keyword research. Many potential customers use language and search terms you haven’t anticipated, which can create gaps in your reach.
• Lack of proper analytics and tracking impacts the bottom line: Without continuous monitoring and performance improvements, it’s difficult to understand what’s working and what isn’t. You can’t just set up a PPC campaign and forget about it. You need proper tracking and analytics to track your PPC performance using tools like GA4, Mixpanel, etc.

In today’s competitive landscape, the businesses that thrive are those that maximize the value of every website visitor. This means not just mastering how to bring people to your website, but also creating an experience that efficiently turns those visitors into customers.

How CRO Supercharges Your PPC Performance

One of the most frustrating aspects of PPC is that it essentially ends the moment someone clicks your ad. Your Google Ads or Facebook Ads dashboard might show you how many clicks you’re getting and how many conversions ultimately occurred, but it tells you nothing about what happened in between – the journey from clicks to conversions.

Let’s say only 2% of your ad clicks are converting. PPC platforms can’t tell you why the other 98% left without taking action.

Did they find your offer confusing? Was your form too lengthy? Did the page load too slowly? Without these insights, you’re left making educated guesses about how to improve.

This is exactly where CRO fills the gap.

CRO picks up where PPC leaves off.

While PPC campaigns help deliver qualified leads, CRO deals with what happens next. The relation between PPC and CRO is like a relay race – PPC runs the first leg by delivering traffic, then passes the baton to CRO to carry visitors across the finish line.

Here’s how CRO enhances your PPC performance:

• PPC without CRO is a leaky bucket: You could drive thousands of visitors to your website through brilliant PPC campaigns, but if your landing pages don’t convert, you’re essentially pouring money down the drain. Without CRO, you’re paying for clicks that do not deliver value.
• CRO makes every PPC dollar work harder: When your conversion rate improves, you extract more value from the same amount of traffic. This means you can either reduce spending while maintaining results or maintain spending while dramatically improving results.
• A/B testing or Multivariate testing drives conversions: By systematically testing variations of headlines, images, form design, and call-to-action buttons, you get to know exactly what resonates with our audience. These insights often challenge conventional wisdom and reveal surprising facts specific to your audience.
• PPC and CRO create improvement opportunities: CRO transforms raw PPC data into actionable improvement opportunities. By analyzing user behavior, you identify precisely where potential customers get stuck or lose interest. This data-driven approach ensures your optimization efforts will have the most impact.
• PPC and CRO provide complete funnel optimization: While PPC optimizes the top of your marketing funnel (awareness and interest), CRO optimizes consideration and conversion. Together, they create a seamless customer journey from first impressions to final action.
• Targeted campaigns further increase conversions: By tailoring your ad campaigns to specific groups or segments, you can deliver highly relevant information to users. CRO helps create tailored experiences that speak directly to each segment’s specific concerns and preferences. This way conversion rates will naturally improve.

An integrated PPC and CRO campaign allows you to systematically fix the leaks in your conversion funnel by turning more of those expensive clicks into valuable customers.

Think of it this way: PPC ensures you’re getting the right people to your door, while CRO ensures you’re giving them the right experience once they step inside. Together, they create a system – PPC delivers qualified traffic, and CRO turns that traffic into customers.

For many SaaS businesses, converting ad clicks into free trials is quite a challenge. Our CRO services help product companies like yours tackle such challenges. We use data analysis, copywriting and conversion rate optimization techniques to create landing pages that convert visitors into paying customers, with some landing pages reaching up to 27% conversion rate.

At Vakulski-Group, we don’t rely on hunches – we use concrete data to identify precisely where and why visitors leave your landing page, then systematically test improvements until we find what works best. Do you want to improve your website pages? Contact us to learn more. 

Boost Your Business with Data-Driven Marketing Solutions

Analytics Implementation

Level up your analytics to track every funnel step with precision and drive better results

Data Analysis

Uncover actionable insights and optimize every step of your business journey

CRO

Unleash the power of CRO and run experiments to boost conversions and revenues.

Contact Us

Over 90 satisfied clients & counting

Example of CRO Impact on PPC Performance

To better understand how CRO can dramatically impact your PPC results, let’s imagine a scenario with actual numbers.

Let’s say your SaaS company has a 1.8% conversion rate and a monthly PPC budget of $40,000. You have an average cost-per-click (CPC) of $1.75.

Your monthly paid visitors = $40,000 / $1.75 = 22,857

This is your paid traffic.

Your monthly orders from PPC = 22,857 × 1.8% = 411

Let’s say your average order value (AOV) is $175 with a 65% gross margin.

Monthly revenue from PPC = 411 × $175 = $71,925

Gross Profit = $71,925 × 65% = $46,751

Finally, the net contribution after ad costs will be:

$46,751 – $40,000 = $6,751

Now, the business is making a positive return on their advertising investment, but the margins are thin. For every dollar spent on advertising, they generate about $0.17 in profit after costs.

What happens when we improve the conversion rate?

Now what if we had doubled the conversion rate from 1.8% to 3.6%? Normally you’d think the final number will also double. But that’s not the case.

Let’s see what actually happens:

Monthly PPC budget = $40,000 (unchanged)

Average cost-per-click = $1.75 (unchanged)

Monthly paid visitors = 22,857 (unchanged)

New conversion rate = 3.6%

Now, monthly orders from PPC = 22,857 × 3.6% = 823

Average order value (AOV) = $175 (unchanged)

Monthly revenue from PPC = 823 × $175 = $144,025

Gross margin = 65% (unchanged)

Gross profit = $144,025 × 65% = $93,616

Net contribution after ad costs = $93,616 – $40,000 = $53,616

Let’s see the comparison in a tabular format:

As you can see, the results are striking. Following are the highlights of the results:

• Orders doubled from 411 to 823 – The same traffic now generates twice as many customers without spending an additional dollar on advertising.
• Revenue jumped from $71,925 to $144,025 – Your monthly revenue doubles immediately when your conversion rate doubles.
• Net contribution increased by 694% – While your conversion rate doubled, your profit after ad costs multiplied nearly seven times, from $6,751 to $53,616.
• ROI increased from $0.17 to $1.34 per dollar – For every dollar you invest in advertising, you now generate $1.34 in profit.

This is the power of CRO. A 100% improvement in conversion rate didn’t just double the bottom line – it created a nearly 7x increase in profit contribution.

The other side of the equation: How much were you overspending?

Let’s do some more math. Here’s an interesting fact. Consider the same scenario. If your goal was simply to maintain your original $6,751 monthly profit contribution, how much would you need to spend on PPC after improving your conversion rate?

With the new and improved conversion rate (3.6%), each website visitor is now worth about $2.34 in net contribution ($53,616 / 22,857).

To generate your original profit of $6,751, you would only need:

• Require visitors = $6,751 / $2.34 per visitor = 2,885
• Cost-per-click = $1.75 (unchanged)
• Required ad spend = 2,885 × $1.75 = $5,049

That’s right! After doubling your conversion rate, you could achieve the same financial results while reducing your ad spend by nearly 87%. So, you were effectively overpaying for your conversions by more than seven times – every month.

Crazy, right?

Now, this improvement gives you some great options:

• Keep your $40,000 monthly budget and enjoy a 694% increase in bottom-line contribution.
• Cut your ad spend by 87% (from $40,000 to $5,049) while maintaining the same net profit.
• Reinvest your efficiency gains to outbid your competitors and scale profits further.

This is the perfect demonstration of how an integrated PPC and CRO campaign can be a powerful strategy to address fundamental marketing challenges. By integrating PPC with CRO, businesses of all sizes can create a cohesive strategy that effectively maximizes their reach and impact.

Final Takeaways

In a nutshell, PPC and CRO are two disciplines that create a synergistic relationship, which is vital for any business. Without optimization, even the most well-targeted advertising campaigns fall short as visitors experience friction points that prevent them from converting.

The PPC & CRO collaboration functions as a comprehensive marketing ecosystem – where advertising attracts potential customers and optimization shepherds them toward meaningful action.

Rather than continuously increasing ad spend to drive growth, modern businesses are now focusing on extracting greater value from existing traffic through systematic testing and improvement.

By enhancing your digital marketing strategies through well-structured PPC ad campaigns and meticulous conversion rate optimization (CRO), you can significantly improve your overall marketing performance, while making sure every click contributes effectively to your bottom line.

Do you run paid ads? Do you want to improve your landing page conversions? If you nodded twice, schedule a free consultation with our team today to learn more about how we can help you improve your conversion funnel and increase profits as in the example below. 

Boost Your Business with Data-Driven Marketing Solutions

Analytics Implementation

Level up your analytics to track every funnel step with precision and drive better results

Data Analysis

Uncover actionable insights and optimize every step of your business journey

CRO

Unleash the power of CRO and run experiments to boost conversions and revenues.

Contact Us

Over 90 satisfied clients & counting

Frequently Asked Questions