Second panel of the day is Pay Pay Conversation moderated by Anne Kennedy of Beyond Ink with Bryan Eisenberg of Future Now Inc. and Brett Crosby of Google
The premise behind this panel is the effectiveness of your ongoing conversation with your potential clients that visit your site through PPC. Too many times visitors who come to your site through PPC leave when they get to the landing page. Your page should continue the conversation that got them there in the first place.
Bryan Eisenberg states that 53% of ad budget is focused in on getting people to a site. He also points out that most companies don’t do any multi-variant or A/B testing to see what works on their site. Multi-variant testing works this way: make multiple versions of a landing page and drive traffic to these pages and then measure their success rate. Multi-variant testing is *extremely* effective in telling you that you may not have perfected that landing page on the first go round.
Eisenberg says that 55% of people leave a site by the second click. They lost the ‘scent’ of what they were looking for. Nearly 80% of visitors leave after 3 clicks. So what does this tell us? Well for me it means that I do not want all of my services/products on one page. Each product or service should be it’s own hero complete with it’s own marketing campaign. Now that may sound a little daunting but it doesn’t have to. If all of your products reside on one page most users will not go ‘below the fold’ or scroll down to see if that page has what they are looking for. When a user searches for a product that product needs to be the champion of that landing page. You need to make sure that the steps someone needs to take to get your product in their hands are minimal. If I have to click 3 or 4 times to buy something I want I will go onto the next site, even if it charges more.
Brett Crosby, who helped create Urchin now Google Analytics states we should consider the following
- Landing pages
- Leaky funnel
- Site overlay
- Internal site search pages
Landing pages is pretty basic so you should be able to understand how important a well built landing page can help you.
Leaky Funnels refers to goal paths on a site and how a user navigates a site. Basically it is a path that starts with a landing page of a product or service and ends with a purchase or a contact form being filled out. Leaky refers to somewhere along the line a potential client or sale is lost
Site Overlay refers to a sort of ‘heat map’ of your site. Google Analytics breaks down the clicks on your site and shows you your traffic in real time while looking at your site. So if you have text that is clickable or an image that you can click on Analytics can tell you how many clicks it has and what percentage of clicks it represents
Internal Site Search can be measured through Google Analytics if you have a search function on your site. You can analyze search terms that users have inputted to find pages on your site.
Crosby is pointing out how to use Site Overlay when trying to analyze leaky funnels. Go to your landing or product page and run site overlay to test where clicks are and where they aren’t. This will help show you how effective your pages are in turning a visitor into a buyer or client.
One metric that you should take notice of if you are running PPC is the Bounce Rate. If your bounce rate for PPC is low then you are running a very effective campaign. This means you are spending your money right and users are finding your site informative and want to stay. Coincidentally your organic bounce rate should be a little larger than your PPC. Not by much obviously as we want to have the best site possible but people will always find your site in the strangest of ways. PPC should be concise and effective.
Eisenberg is laying out a lot of things we point out on a regular basis when building a landing page or site. Be transparent, let visitors know who you are. People will convert better if they know that the product or service is backed by a real company or person. ALWAYS have a contact form. You need to make it easy for someone to contact you. He also talks about a ‘Point of Action Assurance.’ If you have set business hours perhaps put an assurance that you will be contacted within a set time period during your business hours if a contact form is filled out. Something like ‘You will be contacted within 2 hours if during 9-5 Monday-Friday.’ Test one page without this assurance against one with and see which one works best.
Overall this panel is very informative and if you use the right tools correctly you can get a clear idea of who visits your site and why. Knowing what they want you can help tailor a conversation that they want to take part in. Each person requests a different message, knowing how to talk to that person can help you build a better site
For more information please contact the Search Engine Marketing Team at Schipul – sem@schipul.com