With over 1 million verified software reviews, Capterra is the leading marketplace and review system for software products across the globe. However, it is also a great platform for technology vendors that are looking to reach a very specific target audience and boost their conversions through niche advertising.
For this reason, today we will see the best strategies to optimize your Capterra PPC Campaign and maximize your budget in order to get the best results possible.
If you want to learn more about Capterra advertising and whether Capterra Ads are actually worth it, you can check this article where I explain everything in detail. However, if you are already running a Capterra PPC Campaign, just continue reading for some simple but powerful tips to boost your conversions.
How can I optimize my Capterra PPC campaign?
Here are some things that you can do to make your ads more effective:
1. Optimize your categories
As opposed to Google Ads, in which you bid on keywords to reach your target audience, Capterra works by letting businesses bid on over +800 software categories. For you as an advertiser, this means that you will have to select carefully the categories that are the most relevant for your business.
If you’ve been running your Capterra PPC campaign for over a few weeks, it’s time to revise your categories and see which ones are generating the highest number of conversions for the lowest CPL. If you started with way too many categories (typically over 10), it’s definitely time to refine your audience.
Go to Insights – Click Report, and take a good look at your metrics. In my case, I have filtered out the specific categories for privacy reasons, but you can get the idea.
In this example, we can clearly see that Category 2 (the second row) has been the only one that has generated any conversions, so it has clearly outperformed the rest. This doesn’t mean that Category 1 or Category 3 will never work for you – but it does mean that you will have to take some action.
Here are a few quick strategies that you can do to continue improving your Capterra PPC Campaign from the category perspective:
- Pause the underperforming categories and add a few new ones to test;
- Keep the underperforming categories, but increase the bid or change the country in which they show up;
- Tweak your ad copies and images to make your product more relevant for the low-performing categories.
The point is, don’t just keep the software categories that are not working for you without doing anything. If you have too many, you can easily discard a few of them, but if you barely have less than 3 (like in this example), it can be beneficial to add a few new ones to test.
2. Increase your bid
In relation to the previous point, if you notice that your average position is really high, this means that your software categories may be underperforming simply because you are not showing up on the top of Capterra’s search results.
If people don’t scroll down long enough to see all the options for the tool that they are looking for, it is possible that they make a decision to purchase without even considering you – just because they didn’t even see you.
So, one way in which you can enhance your Capterra PPC Campaign and boost your conversions is to increase your bid. By increasing your bid, you increase your chances of showing up higher among the search results. This translates to more visibility and more traffic to your website or landing page – and more leads, of course.
The minimum bid on Capterra starts at $2 and can be increased in $0.25 increments.
3. Test different landing pages
Another way in which you can optimize your Capterra PPC Campaign is to test multiple landing pages. Whether you have decided to run your campaigns with the platform’s native landing page, or your own page, it doesn’t mean that it only has to be one or another.
Unfortunately, you can’t run A/B tests on the platform in order to test different landing pages simultaneously. However, what you can do is try one page during 2 weeks, and change the URL to a new one for 2 extra weeks. Then, you can compare the results to see which one worked better, and continue testing with new versions.
4. Include keywords in your ad copies
Although Capterra ads don’t work by bidding on keywords, it doesn’t mean that keywords don’t matter. Because, as a matter of fact, they do. When you write your ad descriptions, make sure that you include keywords that are relevant to your business and technology.
By doing so, you will not only make it easier for users to find your product and click on your Capterra PPC Campaign, but you will also draw their attention in a more effective way. Keywords will enrich your ad and help you connect with the right buyers at the right moment.
5. Opt-in for GetApp & Software Advice
You can increase the reach of your Capterra PPC Campaign by opting in for GetApp & Software Advice, two software review platforms that are separate from Capterra.
The platform allows you to advertise on them as well – all you need to do is customize your ad descriptions to fit each platform, and you can get your extra ads up and running in no time. No separate budget is required to do that.
Once you start running your ads on all 3 platforms, you will be able to take a look at the results separately so you can decide which platform works the best, and optimize accordingly. If one of them is not delivering the desired results, you can always opt-out at any time.
6. Get more reviews for your software
Another powerful way in which you can improve your Capterra PPC Campaign is to obtain more reviews for your software product. This strategy combines organic with paid advertising, but it can be very effective – and here is why.
When a user searches for a specific tool or software, the first thing that they will most often see are the companies with the highest bids as they will be showing on top. However, no matter how high you are on the search results, if you have a bad rating, your ad won’t be very enticing to click on.
Let’s take a look at this example when searching for a Human Resources software.
Although both Mirro and PeopleForce, the two companies that showed on top, has the exact same rating, Mirro’s campaign looks much more intriguing because it has 119 reviews, compared to just 5 reviews by PeopleForce. Despire the fact that it is ranking worse than PeopleForce.
The reason why is because it’s harder to maintain a good rating when you have hundreds of reviews as opposed to barely having less than 10 reviews. So, Mirro’s product looks more solid and highly recommended as it has maintained a consistent rating.
For this reason, it’s very important for you to encourage customer feedback and try to get as many reviews as possible. Of course, the more positive reviews and ratings you have, the better, but make sure that they are honest and real. Otherwise, you are really only lying to yourself.
If you want to learn more about that, make sure to check my article on brand reputation management.
7. Include more information on your logo
This may seem like a small detail when optimizing your Capterra PPC Campaign, but after all, everything adds up to deliver better results for your business.
When you are browsing for software products, you don’t see any screenshots, videos or images until you actually click on a certain tool. The only image that you see is the company’s logo, so adding a little bit more information about your brand or software can attract the attention to your ad.
It can be a slogan or simply a word that clearly displays the nature of your tool, such as the word “CRM” in this example:
It helps the user to immediately know what your tool is about.
8. Start your copy with a powerful first sentence
Apart from including keywords in your descriptions, another trick to boost your Capterra PPC campaign is to optimize the first sentence of your description. It is important because it will be the first thing that your audience will read when discovering your product, so it needs to be informational and captivating.
If your first sentence is not intriguing enough and doesn’t capture the attention, they might not continue reading the rest of the description. For this reason, make sure that:
- You mention who you are and what you do;
- It’s clear what makes you different;
- It’s clear whom your tool is for;
Here is one great example from Sendinblue:
They tell users more about their business, differentiate themselves as being the “best all-in-one tool” for Marketing Automation, and have a clear target audience – small businesses.
9. Optimize countries
Another strategy that you can use to enhance your Capterra PPC campaign and boost conversions is to optimize the countries that you are targeting. Basically, the idea is exactly the same as the first point in which we were looking at optimizing categories.
You analyze your data for each country, and focus on the ones that are converting the best for your business. Of course, it is important to keep in mind that there are some important differences as well.
Some countries will always be more expensive than others by default due to high competition (such as US or UK), so you might need more budget for them in order to yield good results. These countries may very by software categories, but it is just something to have on your radar.
You can easily manage locations and add/remove countries by going to Bidding – Manage Locations. You can also look at the countries data as a summary or separately.
Capterra PPC Campaign: optimize your countries
Pay close attention to different metrics, such as conversion rate and average position in order to make a well-informed decision.
And that was all from me for today! As always, thank you for taking the time to read my article on enhancing your Capterra PPC Campaign, and I hope to see you in the next one. If you are looking for more networks where you can advertise on that are not Google Ads or Capterra, check my article Top 15 Powerful Alternatives to Google Ads for 3x More Leads.
If you need help with your Marketing campaigns and strategy, you can also check my agency Marketing Toolbox or send me an email to ani@mktoolbox.com.
