PPC School: Don’t ask too much from your Lead Conversions

Contrary to popular belief, Pay Per Click advertising is not really about clicks. As becomes painfully obvious when you look at your company bank statements and see click costs going out but no business coming in, clicks can only get you so far. That’s why pouring your money into keywords with high click-through rates is not always the best idea, unless you can prove that they’re actually making you money.

That’s what conversion tracking is for. As you probably know, conversion tracking code allows you to see how many of the people accessing your site through adwords actually go on to complete the goal you have set, i.e., get to the thank you page that signifies buy something or sign up to your newsletter etc. It lets you actually find out the keywords that are profitable in real terms, the ones you want to push.

So now we know that conversions are the name of the game, how do we increase them? how do we make sure that people get to that page? Well, if you’re trying to get people to buy things there are almost limitless ways in which you can encourage conversions, some of which get very complicated, so that might have to be a subject for another post. What I want to talk to you about today is lead/sign up enquiries.

Luckily, convincing someone to fill out an online sign up form to receive a newsletter or sales call is much, much easier than convincing them to actually part with money. However, there are two main things you can do to make it simpler still.

1.Make it easy to find. Do not hide your sign up form away on one obscure page of your site, put it front and centre on your homepage with a clear call to action that explains the benefit of filling out the form and clicking send. Actually, come to think of it, there’s no reason you can’t have a sign up form on more than one page of your site, maybe even all of them.

2.Don’t ask too much. For most sales enquiries you only need two things, a name and a way to contact them, to sign up to an email newsletter it’s even simpler, all you need is an email address. Even so, almost every sign up form I see has row after row of extraneous information, like addresses and pointless questions like ‘how did you hear about us?’ You can find this sort of information out in the sales call, there’s no reason to jeopardise the lead to find it out.

Related posts:

1. Updates to Google Conversion Metrics (Part 1)
2. Creating a Newsletter Sign up Form
3. 5 tips for creating kick ass landing pages for pay per click
4. PPC School: Reasons to use Long-Tail Keywords
5. Should pay per click Landing Pages be optimised for Search Engines?
6. PPC School: Reasons to use Long-Tail Keywords