So you've set up your PPC campaign, how do you improve your conversion rates when everything else seems ok?

Ad text – good
Bid amount – good
Ad position – good
Click thru rate – good
Conversions – bad

The answer is in the landing page. Below are four landing page tips that make all the difference to your conversion rates:

1. Landing page information matches the ads

What can be frustrating for customers is clicking through on an ad and the landing page information is different to what they had seen in the ad title and description. For example, if you claim that there is 50% off all mp3 players in your ad text make sure that your landing page also says 50% off. If searchers do not see the keywords they have searched for on your landing page then they will hit the back button in their browser.

2. Call to action

If your conversion is a sale, application for an offer, newsletter sign up etc then you need to make it clear at the top of your landing page. Do not overload your page with text content and make the mistake of putting your ‘Buy Now’ or ‘Sign up Now’ button at the bottom. People’s patience online is less than it is offline; the chances are that they will not scroll down to the bottom so the call to action must stand out at the top. Don’t be afraid to make the call to action button big and bright, otherwise visitors just might not see it and go to shop / research online elsewhere.

3. Security

If you are gathering people’s confidential information such as credit card details or contact details then people need to be sure that this information is safe and secure. If you are selling products you should have text to talk about ‘encryption’, ‘security verification’ etc and if your desire is for contact details to be captured then you need to make it clear that their information will not be shared with third parties and be explicit about ‘confidentiality’, ‘privacy policy’ etc.

 

4. Clarity and Simplicity

It is amazing how many people can overlook this. High conversion rates are all about clarity and simplicity. If there are too many clicks required to complete the conversion the drop off rate will be high. If you claim an item costs £x.xx but have failed to mention the delivery costs until the following page the result will be that your potential customer will check elsewhere. If you are asking for one set of information on one page and then your site visitor sees that clicking on the ‘Continue’ or ‘Submit’ button leads to a page that wants a lot more information then many people will stop there and abandon the purchase / sign up. Do not dilute your offer by trying to have too many options on the one page. The result is that there are too many things fighting for attention. Techniques to upsell or cross sell on alternative products can work extremely well but if you are doing this make sure that it does not distract from completing the main objective on your landing page.

If you feel that your landing page is not matching up to one of the four tips then try to make some changes. After you do this you should start to see an improvement in conversions and make sure you have the tracking cookie where it should be.

For more information on how to set up conversion tracking please visit the Tracking Your Conversions on the Microsoft Advertising site