Holistic Internet Marketing

Whether you are running pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns, other paid advertising, or relying on organic search engine rankings, these tips on optimizing your landing pages will help you to achieve higher conversion rates on your website.

Are you getting traffic to your web site, but finding that visitors are not taking any action? The following suggestions will have you on your way to optimizing your landing page(s) thus, improving your conversion rates:

1. Focus your Landing Pages

Your landing pages should have one offer that you focus on in order to achieve higher conversion rates. If your visitors land on a page where there are many options, with many calls-to-action and paths they can take through your site, you are only losing focused attention on the primary goal. Whether your conversion is completing a lead form, making a purchase, or signing up for a newsletter or membership, make this the main intent of your page. Give your visitors too many choices, and you run a high risk of losing them. This term is called “abandonment”. Abandonment is when your visitors initiate an action, but do not follow through. Look at your landing pages, and identify potential “abandonment points”, and remedy the situation by eliminating them.

2. Present a Clear Call-to-Action

Tell your visitors what you want them to do. If someone is looking at your page, and you have their attention, compel them to take action. Let’s say, as an example, you are an investment broker, and you are looking to attract more clients. You should have a clear call-to-action that makes the user want to proceed, such as “Start Getting Better Returns Now”. As an additional point, you should have only one call to action on the page. In some instances there may be two, such as “Download Now”, vs. “Start your Free Trial Now”. Your one, clear, concise call-to-action should stand out on the page visually. You can do this through different text treatments or better yet, a nice, clean button.

3. Summarize Your Offer

People scan web pages, and decide very quickly whether or not their interest is piqued. Keep your body copy brief - bullet points of the key benefits of your product/offer are the easiest to read. If you need to explain further, summarize as much as possible, trying to have only one to two paragraphs of text on the page. The most important content is that which solves a problem or lets the user know “what’s in it for them”. Try to stay away from sing a lot of “marketing fluff”, and make the best use of all of the words you choose to use on the page.

4. Test, Analyze, Repeat

By A/B testing, you can narrow down what works and what doesn’t with your landing pages. A/B testing is running two landing pages against each other which have minor differences, and then measuring which one converts better. The differences should be minor, and changes that you make can be one of the following: call-to-action text, heading on the page, position of the form (right side vs. left side), bulleted copy on the page, even little changes can make a difference in landing pages, such as the color of the call-to-action button. Make one change at a time, and before you know it, you will end up with great improvements in your conversion rates.

5. Keep Copy and Keywords Consistent

If you are utilizing pay-per-click, link-building, or other contextual methods of bringing traffic to your landing pages, make sure that the ad creative copy is consistent with what the user will get when they come to the landing page. The bait and switch is not a good technique, and if visitors reach your landing page thinking that they are getting one thing, and then see something different, chances are they will bounce very quickly. Try to use the same calls-to-action as in your ad creative to give more consistency to your campaign. This also will save you from spending money on clicks from a PPC campaign that will be wasted.

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Tags: abandonment, campaigns, conversion rates, Getting Quality Website Traffic, improving your conversion, Internet marketing, offer, optimizing your landing page, Pay Per Click, PPC, Search Engine Marketing, search engine rankings, testing, traffic, web pages

Heather Lutze, CEO/Founder Lutze Consulting posted on her blog Pay Per Click Podcast about the importance of creating targeted landing pages in PPC campaigns. By listening to the reasoning of not using your home page as your landing page, and testing landing pages, I am sure that you will find higher conversion rates from your PPC campaigns. This post is a must-read, and must do to improve your PPC conversion rates and ROI.

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Tags: campaigns, conversion, landing pages, Pay Per Click, Pay-Per-Click (PPC), PPC, roi

Metrics to pay attention to when measuring the success of your PPC campaigns.

I talked in an earlier post about measuring and tweaking your PPC campaigns, so now I will let you know what metrics are important, and what to do with these metrics in order to improve your campaign.

ROI - ROI, or the return on investment, is the most important measurement of all, unless you are not using your PPC campaign for profit, and only for branding purposes. In order to measure your ROI, you will first need to know a couple of things.

1. What is your conversion, and how much is it worth?
For instance, if you are selling a widget, or many widgets, the amount you receive in profit for a purchase is what you will use for the equation.
2. What is your spend amount?
Spend can be determined in a lot of different ways, such as, total ad spend or the entire budget, total spend for a certain

After you have these metrics, all you need to do is take the total spend minus the profit you made, then divide that total by your spend. Here is an example:

You spend $1000 on a Google AdWords campaign, out of this, you obtain 12 sales, each giving you a profit of $110. So, from this campaign, you made $1,320. You spent $1,000 for the campaign, so your profit is $320 ($1,320-$1,000). The next step is taking your profit and dividing it by your spend ($320/$1000=.32). Your ROI is 30%.

CTR - CTR stands for Click-through-rate. CTRs are important in determining whether or not your creatives that you use for your keywords are effective. CTR is determined simply by taking the number of clicks you receive on your ad creative divided by the number of impressions. For instance, if your ad creative was shown 123 times, and clicked on 3 times, your CTR is 2.4% (3/123=.024).

CTR is important for determining a number of things:

1. If you are using Google AdWords, the higher CTR you have, the lower your cost-per-click becomes
2. How relevant your ad creative is to the keywords and key phrases you are bidding on
3. Whether you need to adjust your bid amount for positioning to achieve a higher CTR

With this said, it is possible to have low CTRs but high conversion rates. This can be the case if the keywords and key phrases you are bidding on are broad, but your ad is very specific, which makes the visitors who click on your ad more targeted.

Conversion Rate - Your conversion rate is also a very important measurement, as you want to constantly analyze and tweak your campaigns to achieve higher and higher conversion rates. The higher your conversion rate, the lower the cost per sale.

Conversion rate is figured by taking the number of sales, or leads, or sign-ups, what ever your conversion goal is, divided by the number of visits to your landing page sent by your PPC campaign.

As an example, if the conversion goal of your PPC campaign is to obtain a lead via a lead form submission, and you receive 105 leads from 2,100 visitors, your conversion rate is 5% (105/2100=.05).

There are many more measurements to be covered in a future post, but get a grasp on these for now, as they are a crucial part of understanding how successful your PPC campaign is.

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Tags: campaigns, click through rate, conversion rate, ctr, minternet marketing, Pay Per Click, Pay-Per-Click (PPC), PPC, return on investment, roi