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Your Website is the Red Zone
Pay Per Click is only the first step in producing leads or sales. When a searcher clicks to visit your website, you’re in the “Red Zone”. Scoring a success depends on the ability of your website to convert visits into profitable business.
According to Marketing Sherpa, only 5% of paid clicks convert to anything more than one click. Short punchy Pay Per Click ads generates a lot of clicks from a wide variety of people who are often confronted with long convoluted Web pages which attempt to sell all things to all visitors. |
The Importance of Message Matching
The key to successful Pay Per Click and post click marketing is message matching which starts with the keyword. Your Ad Groups should be organized with tight groups of keywords closely related to the title of your ad. In most cases, the keyword should be repeated in the title of your ad. When this happens Google will bold the keyword giving your ad more impact.
If someone is searching for “red apples” they will see “Red Apples” in the title of your ad. This is effective marketing because it fulfills the promise of the search confirming a match between what you offer and what the searcher wants.
Message matching is equally important after the searcher clicks to visit your website. The first thing they need to see is “Red Apples”. If you direct your pay per click traffic to a busy home page with many options, visitors are likely to leave your site immediately and return to the search page results to find what they want.
Landing Pages
You have several options in designing the landing experience for website visitors who click on your Pay Per Click ads. If you sell multiple products, you may have specific product pages which are well matched to your ad text.
However, if you have an extensive list of keywords with matching ad variations, the message in your ad text may not match the headline of your product page. Another option is to create special landing pages with minor variations to match the text of your ads. These specialized landing pages link back to your website, but you don’t need to provide links to all these highly duplicative landing pages in your site navigation.
Segmenting Your Visitors
Searchers who click on your Pay Per Click ads are not the same. Following up on the earlier example, someone who clicks on your ad for Red Apples may want apples to eat, sell or bake into pies. When a prospect contacts you by phone, you don’t immediately start selling. The first step is to ask questions in order to qualify the prospect and determine their needs.
You can also do this on the Internet by providing a segmentation page which gives respondents a small number of clear pertinent choices to help you match them with content tailored to their interest.
But will they click? Conventional wisdom holds that asking for an additional click is a bad idea. However, experience with segmentation pages indicates that visitors are willing to offer a click if it promises to fulfill their needs. Segmentation pages provide valuable information enabling you to increase conversion rates.
Conversion Paths
Segmentation pages enable you to create multi-page conversion paths which can be much more effective than “one size fits all” landing pages. Following the initial segmentation page, subsequent pages on the path give your site visitors simple choices guiding them through a short series of targeted messages to your offer and fulfillment pages.
An effective conversion path may have two steps or several, with multiple branches for each category of visitor. Conversion paths enable you to collect valuable information to qualify visitors and custom tailor your offer and fulfillment pages to your prospects’ interests and needs.
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