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First, let's define a "conversion". Throughout this article, we'll
be using the word "conversion" or "converted visitor" to indicate that the
visitor you received from a PPC campaign has been "converted" from merely
a visitor into something more. What that "more" is, is dependant on your
specific company and products/services.
In the most simple terms, a conversion
is a visitor that makes a purchase. However, there are plenty of reasons
to count visitors that do not make a purchase as a "conversion" as well.
Take the software company that sells a program for $10,000.00. 99.99%
of the time, a visitor will NOT make a purchase from the website. In this case
a "conversion" might be a visitor that has seen 5 or more pages, or perhaps
has navigated down to the "Call us for more information" page.
The point we're trying to hammer home here is that when calculating your
ROI or Conversion Rate, it's imperative that you look at more than just
your bottom line, but also look at things that could have an effect on
your bottom line later on down the road, and also at things that are indicators
of the general success of your campaign, and your website in general.
Do everything in your power to give your keywords a chance to succeed
For each of your keywords, put yourself in the place of the person performing
the search, and ask yourself the following questions:
If you searched on that keyword ....
1. Would you be compelled to click the link to your web site ?
It's a good idea to tailor, as best as you can, the title and description
of your listing to the keywords that you're bidding on. In some engines,
such as openPPC, where you tie many different keywords to one master
title/description, you'll need to either be more descriptive with your
listing information, or group like keywords together and manage multiple
listings tied to these groups. Include, if you can, the keyword you're
bidding on somewhere in the title or description. This hammers home
the relevance of your listing to your visitor. When doing this, avoid
being too generic. If you have 500 listings, that all look the same
(i.e.: Find keyword here at my website), you'll lose visitors, as
this negates the effect of inclusion.
2. If you were compelled to click the link, would you be disappointed
in what you are presented with at the web site?
It's imperative that if you're bidding on a keyword, that the page your visitor ends up at
on your web site, called the landing page be as relevant as possible
to that keyword. If your keyword is a product name, then make sure that
your keyword links to that product's information page, not your web site's home
page! Rule of thumb: The person searching should not have to click at all
once they arrive at your website to get to the page that centers around
the keyword that they searched for. In all cases, do not bid on a
keyword that you cannot deliver a product or service for. Not only is
it misleading to the searcher, but it'll kill your bottom line, as the visitors
you'll end up will have no compelling reason to stay, or buy.
Your landing page is as important to your success as choosing the
proper keywords. Most PPC Search Engines will allow you to either have
separate landing pages for each keyword, or will provide you the ability
to embed the searched keyword into your landing page url (openPPC allows
for both). Use that to your advantage to ensure that the landing page
is 100% relevant to the word being searched. Your landing page could
be a specific HTML page on your server, or a dynamic (CGI, PHP or ASP)
generated page that draws it's content based on the keyword sent in.
The jury is still out on the "official" recommendation for the amount of
and type of content to be placed on your landing page. Some circles preach
that the landing page should be all encompassing, having every bit of
information possible on it to give the visitor no excuse not to buy, and
no reason not to click to a detail page, since all the detail is right there
for them on that one huge page. Our personal recommendation is based on
studying the surfing habits of real people. We make it a hobby to watch
our family and friends surf the internet ... and what we see is that
after a search, users tend to browse a page very quickly, 10 seconds
at the most, and almost never scroll down. They either close the browser
window right away (content irrelevant), bookmark it for later, or read
briefly the content that is directly on screen, and only continue on
if compelled to. Therefore, our recommendation is to structure your
landing pages so that you have no more than a paragraph of text, in large
type (larger than your normal website text), a picture if at all possible,
and 5-7 of your best bullet points, in bold text. The picture grabs
attention, the bold bullet points will quickly answer their "Does it do..."
questions, and your paragraph should be short, sweet, and just sales-pitchy
enough to encourage them to either bookmark you, or continue on for
more information about this product or service.
A bad landing page will result, every time, in the visitor simply closing
down the browser window with your web site in it, costing you money,
and wasting their time and your resources.
Once you have the visitor on site, tracking their activity, and using that
data to make decisions on your campaign is paramount to your campaign's success.
- Which of your PPC Keywords is sending you the most visitors?
Every PPC engine you bid with has a reporting tool which should give you
this basic information. Remember, from our previous discussions, that
the raw number of visitors you receive is less important than the quality
of those visitors.
- Which of your PPC Keywords generated the most sales or qualified leads?
As noted above, a qualified lead can be just as valuable to your company
as an actual sale. Someone that finds you, heads to your company info
page and picks up the phone is just as good as a sale, from the perspective
of calculating your ROI.
- By result type, which of your PPC Keywords is getting the more serious visitors to your web site?
What is a serious visitor? Someone that visits more than one page? More than 2?
What we recommend that you do is to identify "Hot Zones" within your website.
Pages that are indicative of the level of interest your visitor has. As an
example, if you sell a product, and you have a "main product page", a "detailed
feature list" page, and a separate downloadable "white paper" page ... your
visitors level of interest can be easily seen by how far into your product
information they've drilled down. Someone downloading the "white paper"
must be pretty serious. Even if they don't end up as a customer, it's important
to take note of this activity. You'll soon discover that some of your
keyword bids seem to lead to a higher percentage of visitors drilling down
to your "money pages" ... this tells you that these are your better keywords,
and you should put more of your attention on them, and their derivatives.
- Again, by result type, which of your PPC Keywords is sending you the most drive-by or junk traffic?
As some keywords seem to always deliver you serious visitors, and generate
quality leads, others will simply be sending you traffic that you cannot
convert. You may notice (using the software company as an example again) that
on some keywords, the vast majority of visitors heads right off to your free
downloads page, grabs your eval version, and never returns. It's up to you
to figure out why. Was the keyword too generic? Did you bid too high on
the keyword, putting yourself in 1st, 2nd or 3rd spot, and now your listing
is showing up to all the AOL users (which might be an audience that you
don't want to hit)? We suggest either tweaking your bid amounts to get out
of the top spots, or eliminating these words altogether. If a keyword is
generating lots of traffic (and therefore lots of costs), but little to no
revenue, dump them. Its better to have a little bit of good traffic than a lot
of junk traffic.
How do you get the answers to these questions? Two Ways:
- The hard (but free) way: Analyze your server logs
You will be able to track, by IP number, hits to your
landing pages, which should alert you to which keywords
were searched on. Most log analysis software will allow
you view visitor paths through your website, so you can
see every page that visitor went to once they hit your
website. This information is valuable not only in learning
about how your keywords are doing, but it's also a great
insight into your website navigation as it relates to
visitor habits. You might learn that less than half of
your visitors actually "surf" your website the way you
intended.
- The easy (but not-so-free) way: Subscribe to a Tracking Service
There are numerous services available that will, for a
monthly fee ranging from $39.00 to upwards of $3,000,
track your PPC visitors by keyword and activity. Some
of these services, such as our sister service
advertisingperformance.com,
will allow you to track not only the number of visits per
keyword, and the number of sales per keyword, but will also
be able to report to you the depth to which your paid visitors
are hitting your website. Knowing not only how a visitor
found you, but if they got to your "key" or "money" pages
once they got to you is important information. There's a
complete list of other tracking services on the Resources
page at the end of this article series.
We recommend a combination of both methods. Tracking services are
wonderful for extrapolating keyword specific performance as it relates
to money-out/money-in, but your raw server logs contain an absolute
wealth of information which, when properly reported, can provide you
with unbelievably valuable information ... and possibly the impetus to
do some re-tooling based on visitor activity.
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