How to increase conversions from Adwords

One of the fastest and cheapest ways to boost your return on Adwords spend is, perhaps surprisingly, nothing to do with the Adwords creatives or placements. According to a recent study by analytics vendor Compete, you can achieve up to 5 times the ROI by improving your post-click landing experiences.

So what things could you be doing to improve your landing experiences?

TIP 1 - USE CUSTOM LANDING PAGES

A landing page is a custom page on your website that has a very specific job of converting prospects into sales. The great thing with a well focussed Adword creative is that you’ve already managed to get a qualified prospect, and so you now have the luxury of focussing right in on what you know they come for. Now that you have them, the landing page can focus on persuading the prospect to click on the primary call-to-action.

TIP 2 - DON’T GET IN THE WAY

If you think of the path from the Adwords Ad to the closed sale as being a conversion funnel, you’ve already paid good money to get someone into the funnel so the last thing you need to do is to encourage them to step right out of it. Avoid the temptation of providing links or navigation to other content that distracts people from what they came for and avoid other distractions and eye-candy that simply get in the way.

TIP 3 - USE CLEAR CALLS-TO-ACTION

“Apply Now”, “Subscribe Now”, “Buy Now”, “Start Your Free Trial Now”. These are calls-to-action. People are much more like to progress to the next step if these calls to action are loud and clear, and work especially well if the language used matches the wording in the ad. Use large prominent buttons to encourage people to click through.

TIP 4 - ESTABLISH CREDIBILITY QUICKLY

People who arrive at your landing page may have never visited your website before and may never have heard of your company or products before. So it’s vital to make people feel confident about moving forward. You don’t need to overdo it though. Sometimes a clear prominent statement like ‘Over 10,000 happy customer worldwide” may be all that’s needed - so long as it’s genuine of course!

TIP 5 - SEGMENT YOUR CUSTOMERS

Sometimes, there’s no way in advance to know who your audience is. Imagine you sell client management software and you service clinical practices and gymnasiums. So if someone was to search for “client management software”, it’s impossible to know which type of customer they are. Here’s where segmentation is really powerful. Instead of having a single landing page, you start with a page which gives segmenting options. You then link through to audience specific (landing) pages. The audience specific pages can then have highly targeted messaging and imagery.

Happy converting!