Paid advertising campaigns can be used to achieve any number
of goals. Advertisers may want to generate orders, create
new leads, buy cheap traffic for advertising revenue,
collect e-mail addresses or even just promote their brand.
However, the measurability of PPC has meant that it is
primarily a direct response marketing tool, and the ROI of
every click is vital.
One of the key factors that advertisers should consider when
looking to increase the profit of a campaign is optimising
the landing page - the page that the user ends up on when
they click on your ad. By optimising the landing page you
will ensure that your site is converting as many of your
paid visitors as possible and that you are making the most
of your spend. Advertisers that fail to take this into
account may be wasting valuable profit margins, or writing
off potentially good campaigns that have been unsuccessful
simply because they were not given a fair chance.
Advertisers that make the most of their pages find that they
get more sales for the same spend, make better margins and
can therefore put more money into advertising.
Choosing a landing page to optimise
The first step to optimising your landing page is to choose
the right page to start with. Inexperienced advertisers can
sometimes point all of their adverts to one page on their
site, forcing paid visitors to search your site to find what
they are looking for. Pay per click advertising on networks
such as Google, Yahoo and MSN is a powerful tool, and these
networks allow you to make your campaigns as granular as
you would like. If you are advertising for multiple products
or services, split your campaign into different groups for
each product and make your ad text and landing page
specific to each product that you are targetting. Removing
that extra step needed to purchase your goods or services
will make your users all the more likely to convert.
Optimising landing pages for conversion
The next stage is to make sure you optimise the best landing
pages possible for the user. It is a general rule in pay
per click marketing that the user should see consistency
across the entire buying process. If a user enters the
search term "japanese dictionary", then they are more likely
to click on adverts that contain the exact term "japanese
dictionary" (preferably in the advert title) and are more
likely to convert on a page with the words "japanese
dictionary" displayed to them immediately and prominently.
The technique for optimising landing pages can be taken to
the extreme - some advertisers will make multiple versions
of the same page to deal with different variations of
popular terms, while others will interogate information sent
to them by the user's computer in order to work out exactly
what the user typed into the search engine. This level of
optimising landing pages can be successful in some
circumstances, but are probably overkill for the average
retailer or service provider - instead it is usually
adequate to bear this rule in mind when designing your
landing pages and adverts and try to cover as many of the
key terms as you can.
Optimising landing pages - A practical example
To keep with our Japanese Dictionary example, an
inexperienced retailer may advertise on the term "Japanese
dictionary" with the following ad text:
Cheap Kodansha Dictionary Low price reference books for
university and college students.
www.cheapreferencebooks.com
When the user clicks on the advert they may be taken to a
dictionaries page with the headline "Low Price Dictionaries
for Language Students" and a list of dictionaries on the
page for the user to look through. At no stage throughout
the process has the user's very clear requirement of a "japanese dictionary" been re-enforced, and the user is
instead made to take unnecessary steps to purchase the
product they want to buy.
In an ideal world the advertiser may have presented the
advert:
Japanese Dictionary Low price Kodansha Japanese dictionary.
Free delivery. www.cheapreferencebooks.com
When the user clicks on the advert they would be taken to
the "Kodansha Japanese Dictionary" product page, with the
words "Kodansha Japanese Dictionary" clearly written in
large type at the top of the page, immediately in view of
the visitor when they arrive at your site. This will show
the user at every stage that you are taking them in the
direction that they want to go, and that the service that
you provide is the one that they want.
Usability optimisation on landing pages
Usability best practice is a factor that many retailers fail
to consider, but can boost conversions from both your paid
and natural traffic, and can be applied to every page on
your site, not just your landing pages. The key to good site
usability is removing the need for the user to figure out
how to acheive their (and your) goals on your site. The more
the user has to think, the less likely they are to
convert.
Usability optimisation on landing pages is especially
important because a user who has just arrived at your site
makes immediate evaluations about all aspects of your
business, including whether you provide the service they're
looking for, and whether you are a trustworthy company to
do business with. At this delicate stage in your
relationship with the customer, the customer is extremely
fickle and can just as easily leave and go to a competing
site. Therefore small adjustments to the quality of your
landing pages can increase conversions dramatically.
So what are the best practice factors that you should be
looking at in optimising your landing pages? Usability is a
huge topic in itself, but pertinent examples might be:
Do you have a clear strapline describing your websites
purpose?
Is the product title and image prominent and visible
immediately (not below the fold)?
Is the buy button and price prominent and visible
immediately?
Are there complicated options, buttons or links that could
confuse or distract the user?
Will the user know immediately how to use your site and what
they need to do to acheive their goal?
Testing the optimisation of landing pages
The great thing about working on the web is that almost
everything is measurable, and this means that when you make
changes, you can test them. Unfortunately, determining
cause and effect in any test is not always so easy - in a
simplistic example if you run one design in November and
another in December you may conclude that the December test
was more successful, even though the increase was just down
to Christmas traffic. Therefore the ideal tests are carried
out simultaneously.
A/B and multivariant testing are the best ways to approach
these problems. In A/B testing, you split your visitors into
two equal and random groups, and then show one group one
version of a design and another group the original, control
version. If the test group convert significantly better
than the control, then the test is a success, and the new
design is implemented. If the test group convert less well,
then the original design is re-instated.Multivariant testing is the same as A/B testing but with
multiple streams to test multiple changes at the same time,
and is usually only practical on sites with very high
levels of traffic.
Companies that do not have the resources to implement A/B
testing themselves can often form a relationship with third
party suppliers to provide this for them, but even this can
be inhibitively expensive for very low volume operators. A
simple alternative to A/B testing for testing the
optimisation of your landing pages is to install Google
Adwords conversion tracking on your site, and then set up
one adgroup with a series of popular keywords, and two
adverts with the same ad text but a different target URL.
The first target URL can point to the original landing page,
the second can point to a modified version.
There are some important factors to consider when testing
your landing pages:
It is best to test only one variable at a time, and not a
complete redesign. If you test a complete redesign then some
factors may be improved and some may have made it worse, so
you may measure no difference. If you are testing one
variable at a time and there is a difference, you know that
there is only one possible variable that could have caused
the difference.
In Google, switch your test campaign from Ad Serving
Optimisation to Rotation. This is in the Edit Campaign
Settings screen and ensures that Google will show each
advert equally, rather than showing the one that gets the
most clicks more often.It is important to wait long enough for the difference to be
significant (preferably to a certain statistical
confidence). You can read about statistical significance at
Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_significance. Some
results really can be very misleading initially, but can
show no difference or sway in completely the opposite
direction after a reasonable period of time. A small difference is a great difference. A change in
coversion rate from 1.5% to 1.65% is increasing your sales
by 1/10th with no extra advertising expenditure.
The Google landing page quality score
Google have recently added one further complication to
landing page optimisation - the Google landing page quality
score. The Google Quality Score is an algorythm that Google
use to judge the quality of a page - i.e. whether the page
is useful to the user. It has always been used in Google's
analysis of natural results, and SEO experts are very
familiar with its ever changing rules. But in PPC it is new,
and Google are using it to set the minimum bid allowed per
keyword per site - if your site is judged low quality
you're minimum bids will be more expensive.
So what are the rules that make a page low quality? Google
always change these rules and never make the details of them
public - if they did then spam sites would easily find ways
around them. But generally it can be assumed that a page is
low quality if:
The keyword that you are advertising on is irrelevant to the
content of the page that the advert links to.
No part of the content is original
There are a large proportion of adverts or affiliate schemes
on the page, including Google Adsense, banner ads and
popups.
There are a large number of outbound links (eg. a directory
site)
The site is in a "bad neighbourhood" - i.e. it links out to
many sites that Google consider to be of low quality.
It is also often theorised that Google are using behavioural
data to measure the quality of a page - for example, when a
user arrives at a page do they press the back button
straight away and return to Google, or do they continue on
into the site. Whether or not this is true is uncertain, but
if it is then your conversion optimisation could also
positively affect the minimum CPC in your Adwords
campaigns.
Although the introduction of the Google quality score was
bemoaned by many in the webmaster community, it does provide
genuine retailers and service providers with an advantage
over high volume spam sites that they did not have before.
For those who are happy to generate a positive user
experience, complications such as this often also mean
opportunities.
Conclusion
Landing page optimisation is an extremely important part of
an internet marketing strategy, and optimising your pages
can not just increase sales but it can also free up
advertising revenue that was not there before and therefore
increase traffic. There are many factors to consider, but
ultimately with conversion optimisation the focus has to be
on the visitors needs and providing the easiest and best
experience available.
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