Google Website Optimizer
Google Adwords turn traffic on for your site as easily as turning a tap, but as many Adwords users will testify, traffic does not always equal sales conversions.
There’s three many areas to consider when identifying a poor conversion rate. Firstly, the adword copy itself needs to be compelling enough to attract buyers, and yet specific enough to deter timewasters. Secondly, the keywords should be specific enough to ensure you’re targeting the right audience. And finally, your landing page should give an attractive value proposition.
By running pilot studies, you can usually work out the first two parts (but keyword selection will need ongoing experimentation to ensure you get the highest CTR (clickthrough-rate) and lowest CPC (cost per click)). The third part, landing page effectiveness, requires extensive experimentation. You need to look at copy, images, price points, alternative conversion markers to sales (e.g. sign-up for free online course).
Google is highly motivated to help you in these areas. If you don’t get a good ROI on your Adword spend, then the $1.6bn per year cash river will start to dry up. So, to make things really easy, Google’s launched the Web site optimizer. This free online tool lets you run experiments on your site, and uses stats from Adwords to determine exactly which parts of your pages are performing. Of course, you could get us to run it for you …
[Quick WR SEO plug: Jersey web design]
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3 Responses to “Google Website Optimizer”
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Amongst the tools we’ve found the most useful are the target ads by miles radius. This way our clients who only work in their local area avoid wasting clicks from elsewhere. Like you say the conversion tracker is very useful aswell as being able to see which are your most popular landing pages for organic links. I’ll check back for updates, feel free to make additions to my blog website design blog MIKE website design redditch
“… your landing page should give an attractive value proposition.”
“The third part, landing page effectiveness, requires extensive experimentation. You need to look at copy, images, price points…”
More specifially: Usability.
If following generally accepted guidelines, much experimentation isn’t needed. All that’s needed is to test that the principals employed in your prototype sucessfully make the site highly usable for users.
People are more likly to make a purchase from a service which is easy to use and navigate.
Lee: thanks for taking the time to post.
It’s a given that usability is crucial. Too many site owners get preoccupied with visuals, and miss the basics of site usability. The most successful sites of our generation are hardly famed for their visual beauty (e.g. Google or Ebay), but for usability they are 100%.
But after achieving good usability, experimentation on copy, images and price points does effect conversion rates. We’ve found for most low-value commodity sites, Adwords shoppers are incredibly price sensitive.