Digital advertising allows you to measure (almost) everything, optimize quickly and provide great reports. This is especially useful when you are an active advertiser on platforms such as Facebook and Google. If you have a look at a campaign performance report your conclusions will probably be:

• Desktop clicks: High cost per click and high conversion rate
• Mobile clicks: Low cost per click and low conversion rate

So you have 2 options to increase the ROI of your digital campaigns: or you lower the desktop’s Cost Per Click (CPC) or you increase the mobile conversion rate.

Desktop users are a very interesting target group because they tend to have a much higher conversion rate than mobile users, especially when it comes to payments. But making it a profitable campaign target group is becoming more and more difficult. You can optimize your ads, set better audiences,… but in the end the CPC is very much set by the number of competitors and users. You cannot really influence that, right?

So let’s focus a bit more on the low hanging fruit: how to optimize the conversion rates on mobile? In October 2016 there where officially more mobile internet users than desktop internet users!

This explains why the CPCs for almost any given campaign are cheaper on mobile than on desktop. The number of competitors are more or less the same, but there is more inventory available. And we expect this trend to become even more significant in the future. So let’s get the most out of these mobile clicks!

A new look at mobile conversion optimization

When we talk about mobile optimization the main effort is most of the time put in the creation of a mobile friendly landing page, the desktop version in a mobile proof design. This is already a big improvement, but looking at the conversion rates it is unfortunately not the solution.

In order to tackle the conversion challenge we need to take another approach: focus on the customer first by zooming in on what people are most of the time doing on their mobile devices. Therefore we need to look at what a mobile experience looks like for the average mobile user. It is not a surprise, but most time spent on mobile is communication in the form of messaging: WhatsApp, Facebook messenger, WeChat, Viber, Telegram, E-mail, SMS (soon to be gone?),…

The question is, will conversion rates increase when, instead of providing a mobile responsive experience, you offer a messaging experience?

Without any doubt the world is ready for bots:

• The trend on “app fatigue” has clearly entered the market. In 2008 people downloaded on average 8 apps per month. In 2016 we are downloading no apps or only 1 new app per month. For bots you don’t need to download anything!
• Conversational user experience via bots offers the advantage of no installation, no time needed to get acquainted with the interface because it’s running on existing platforms and interfaces,… Bots offer convenience as they are using the messenger trend to the fullest.
• Customers expect 24/7 service, personalized experiences, etc. Bots are designed to do exactly this. Rather than requiring that the user knows exact commands, users can interact with a machine (or a person behind a machine) using natural language.

But concretely, what would happen if, instead of having people going to a landing page, you would lead them to a chatbot/conversational interface? For example, if you are using Facebook advertising this could be the set-up:

We don’t lead the user to the website. Instead we keep them on the Facebook platform. And this has a lot of advantages that can increase the conversion rate:

• Very low bounce rate, since you keep more visitors in the flow of the campaign.
• Super focused and no distraction, since the conversation leads directly to the goal which is the reason why the user clicked on your ad.
• The experience is much more aligned with what users do on a mobile phone, namely sending messages.

So within campaigns the conversions rates for mobile are higher if you drop the landing page completely and replace it by a conversational interface (chatbots).

The proof of the pudding is in the eating

At The House of Marketing we are strong believers of the impact of chatbots on conversion optimization. We had the pleasure, together with our spin-off BotBakery, to launch several bots with conversion increase as an ultimate goal.

Vacature.com is an example. They were looking for a way to increase their conversion rates in terms of job seeker profiles. VICTOR was born, the jobmatcher of vacature.com on Facebook.

We created a bot on Facebook that allows users to provide their profile in the form of a cv upload or just plain text. We also used a machine learning algorithm to directly match the profile with relevant job vacancies. And the results were great!

After 3 weeks 4300 users used the bot (the bot was available both on Facebook and directly on the website of vacature.com). 50% of the users used the Facebook bot. From these 4300 users, more than 2000 users provided their profile and clicked on an actual open job position. 800 users uploaded their CV in the bot. And finally there was a bounce rate of less than 10%.

So in terms of conversions:

• Users who gave their profile: around 50%
• Users who uploaded a CV: around 20%
• Users who clicked on an open position: around 50%

These numbers are great for any campaign!

Lead generation and profile uploads are a nice start and we know it is working. But what about an e-commerce transaction? Would the conversion rate for e-commerce be higher on a bot compared to a normal landing page?

Well, we are setting this up for a big brand in Belgium. Together with Ingenico we are working on a way to do an e-commerce transaction directly in Facebook Messenger, without the need to go to a website. The payment is immediately done inside the Facebook Messenger application.

If you are looking for more inspiration how a bot can help optimizing your communication in every step of the sales funnel, download the conversational commerce slidedeck here or contact our friends of BotBakery!