New Article - The Simple Pay Per Click Change That Could Earn You More

[thejenn]

Full Text: http://www.searchengineguide.com/laycock/004845.html

Some Snippets:

"Chances are high that if you are a small business owner running your own pay-per-click campaign, you are overlooking a small change that could double your conversions."

"...such a simple change could mean the difference between a 2% conversion rate and a 10% conversion rate. Study after study shows that the less clicks you place between your visitor and a purchase, the more likely they are to buy. So why would you make them dig through your site when you could deliver them right to what they are looking for?"

[Cottageman]

Good article, and I couldn't agree more. I've always made it a point to have dedicated landing pages that continue the selling/conversion process that the ads have begun.

In one extreme case, we had dedicated landing pages for every unique keyword combo (and no, I don't mean 'just' pages with different tracking codes. but rather pages whose content was written specifically for that particular keyword combo.

Result:
- Excellent and easy trackability
- Very high conversion rates (when we changed from multiple keywords per landing page to 1:1 matching, our conversion doubled on average...)

One ROI example:
$40 invested in one particular keyword combo over a two year span.
=> 3 B2B sales, one of which was USD 100,000
ROI: 250,000%
That's not bad

Conversion in this particular case was registration for software download. Since we had unique landing pages for each keyword, it was very easy to then track the cycle into even the most basic of CRM / Outlook type systems...

Cheers,

Chris
SearchingWorks

[thejenn]

ROI: 250,000%

LOL! That's fantastic! I love those types of stories.

By the way, welcome to the forums! I hope that you'll stick around and share your knowledge.

[Robert]

Hi Chris! Welcome to the forums and thanks for sharing an example of how going the extra mile to target and track can pay off big.

[KPainley]

Jenn - thanks for a great article. I have advised my clients to adopt a more targeted URL strategy for PPC, and they have all seen great results...with one exception that illustrates the importance of what the customer sees when he/she arrives at the site.

One of my clients was experiencing dismal conversion rates when directing links to product-level pages for highly specific key phrases. Looking into the problem, I discovered that the client had elected to exclude the category navigation bar from their product-level pages in order to devote more "screen space" to the product. As a result, when the customer clicked through from an ad, it appreared as though my client only sold 4 products (the featured one and three cross-sell options in a righthand bar) instead of the hundreds of products that could help establish them as a legitimate business with expertise in their field.

It has only been a week since the navigation bar was added to product pages, and I haven't seen the results, but I expect that conversion rates will go up as a result of this simple change.

[johnnylew]

Is there an HTML code for the navigation bar? I use yahoo stores and have seen other sites with the navigation bar, I love it, but dont know how to add it to my site.

[johnnylew]

to your website? is it a simple HTML code?

please advise.

[eustus]

Originally Posted by KPainley

It has only been a week since the navigation bar was added to product pages, and I haven't seen the results, but I expect that conversion rates will go up as a result of this simple change.

Hey KPainley,

It would be great if you could tell us if the results were as you had predicted. Very interesting point.

eustus