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That “click” you just paid for is in fact a real live lead, heading for your site. A well-designed landing page fulfills the promise made in your ad, and begins the process of converting that lead into a future sale. Analytics help you ensure continued success. Converting Leads (aka, What It’s All About)
Your home page is typically not the best place to convert your visitors into leads. Never require your visitors to click more than once or twice past the landing page to complete an action, like fill out a form or actually buy the product you’re advertising. Optimally, the content on your landing page should echo the offer made in your ad creative. Try taking it one step further and place your lead-capture form right on the landing page. Your return on investment will thank you for it. Of course, your landing page is not the only thing that affects conversion. If you think about it, lead conversion will be most influenced by... - the actual offer being made (we find that thought-leadership content items – white papers, webinars, etc. – tend to work best for B2Bs, in terms of converting the highest-quality leads);
- the design of your landing page; and
- your visitor’s predisposition on clicking through ...and that predisposition is almost entirely the product of your ad creative.
Analytics Help You Fine-Tune Your PPC Program Tracking conversions allows advertisers to accurately measure their ROI. Rather than simply allowing visitors from pay per click advertising to obtain the offered item with a click of a mouse, most companies will ask their visitors to complete a form asking them for a minimal amount of contact information. The search engines have small snippets of code which you place on your confirmation page, and which recognize specific pay per click ads. Between the two, you’re all set up for conversion tracking, which allows you to: - measure your ROI accurately – by ad and by keyword/phrase;
- fine-tune the variables in your PPC program; and
- begin to nurture all those leads your campaign is generating.
Fine-tuning your campaign is a whole subject in itself ...well more than we can treat here. In brief, though, you should always be asking yourself questions such as... What’s the relation between your click-throughs and conversion rates to your ad’s position? Which of your keyphrase matching strategies are providing the best ROI? Which one of your ad creatives is pulling away from the pack? Is it time to drop poorly performing keyphrases and place more of your ad spend in better-performing keyphrases? In fact, you really should envision your campaign as an essentially infinite series of experiments... split tests in which you’re always trying to beat your last best-performing keyphrase, match strategy, ad creative, offer, landing-page design, etc. With reliable feedback available in hours or days, fine-tuning a PPC campaign for maximum ROI via split-testing becomes more feasible than with any other medium. Advertisers should always be trying to beat their last best score. Conversely, taking a “set-it-and-forget-it” approach is usually a recipe for disaster in PPC. It takes a significant commitment of staff time to monitor all of the relevant analytics and run the continual split tests needed to keep your program efficient. Viewed “from above”, the ecosystem consisting of your company, its competitors, each important search engine, the searching public and the keywords they choose to employ is extremely dynamic; all of the variables are in motion all of the time. Whether for reasons of tapping greater expertise or simply supplementing/offloading their own staff’s time, many companies find it prudent to seek expert help from a quality PPC advisor ...like eMagine.
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