See Part 1 of this article here.
Other Considerations When Building Your Landing Pages to Increase Conversion
When building your landing pages, you need to ensure the pages generate a high conversion rate.
Do not use untested, generic Web designers to build your landing pages; they are not being paid to care whether your page converts. Building a successful page is a detailed process that takes years of experience to master. You want a landing page that tells the user within eight seconds that you are a professional, trustworthy service provider who does not take shortcuts—either on your sites or your services; customers will mentally associate those two elements, basically judging a book by its cover (as unfair as that may seem). Eight seconds is all the time your user will give you. Hire a pro.
A trained designer who understands conversion psychology will know to use things like trust elements, calls to action that draw the eye, and an entire list of other components that make your pages convert well. (See examples of well-converting pages.) A page that performs particularly well can convert up to four time more than a poorly designed one.
A great landing page example: trust elements, great info, eye-flow, contract, and more
Step 3. Google AdWords Campaign Conversion Tracking
Even with the best campaign and landing page strategy set up for your business, we still need data to refine our campaigns further. We need to know exactly which keywords are driving inquiries, and at what price. That data becomes available inside your Google AdWords account with the right tracking setup.
AdWords and Analytics Integration
Phone calls generated by our AdWords campaigns are tracked by using the call-forwarding numbers we got from CallRail we set up earlier. CallRail gives you a code to put on your landing pages that will keep track every time a call is placed as a result of your AdWords campaign, and will pass along this call data for Google to match the data it has with your offline call data.
Dynamic telephone call tracking on your website takes just one string of code
With conversion tracking setup by phone, our call data shows up
directly in our AdWords account
Visitors who turn into leads via your website can also be similarly tracked through Google AdWords interface.
For the campaigns I work on, I treat leads that come in from phone calls and form fills as one for campaign optimization purposes. I would recommend doing the same for your campaigns as well.
Over time, you can adjust your bids to more heavily promote keywords that provide a better campaign yield, and less for the keywords that don't.
By knowing which keywords are highly profitable for us, and by bidding more, we will
now be eligible for twice as many profitable ad impressions, greatly increasing our
ability to increase market share
Step 4. Time to Realize Change
After you have set up the best PPC/landing page pairs to generate leads for your local business, it will take considerable time to see your account perform as designed and realize the full benefits from the changes you made.
There will indeed be an immediate increase in the number of leads that come through to your business via an increase in clicks after you overhaul your account, but Google will also provide you two other major sources of benefit once your keyword quality scores have been readjusted:
- Lower-cost ad clicks
- Increase in the total number ad impressions or "search impression share" (percentage) your ads actually receive
Impression share rising while reducing bids...
Higher ad frequency with a reduced cost per impression will give you the ability to secure the best ad positioning in Google—and actually afford to stay there permanently. The longer you stay, the more market share you grab as a result, thus "killing the competition."
Quality Score Adjustments Take a Great Deal of Time
Because Google cares more about its business objectives than yours, new unproven ads and landing pages introduced to its ad serving algorithm will perform fairly poorly, even if they are better than the ads you used before.
Keyword quality scores start at six as a default, no matter how good your ads
and landing pages are
To reduce Google's risk of a revenue dip on its end, Google will slowly test your ads and scale them up only when it has positive supporting data to do so.
Expect for it to take three months, on average, before you consistently see increased profits from your new account setup because of the time it takes for Google data to learn about your new account and fully calculate the value of the positive changes you made.
The amount of time it actually takes to realize gains in your profits will rely on the monthly search volume of the keywords you are bidding on. Higher keyword search volumes will allow Google to more quickly understand how your ads behave.
Don't let this algorithmic bias deter you from improving your campaign; you must make a change to realize superior campaign performance in the long term: 50-100% increases in campaign ROI are well worth this 1-12-week campaign transition period.
Ongoing Negative Keyword Lists
After you have set everything up as described, you will need to continue to add negative keywords to your account to keep improving the relevancy of your ads to Google. It seems like there is no end to the variations someone can use to search for something, so this will be a never-ending process.
The more negative keywords you add to your account, the better your account performance will get in terms of total leads received and actual cost paid for each lead.
Conclusion
Though it could take you time and money to set up this sophisticated lead funnel for your business, the results of your actions will be right there when it is completed.
If you work the plan, these kinds of increases in online market
share are typical...
The longer you go on optimizing your sales funnel using these methods, the more work it will take for your competitors to catch up to you once they realize you're beating them at their game.
Your goal should be to ensure your competitors have no choice but to try to catch up and invest in their own revised PPC lead funnel once their revenue numbers take a big hit from your new "Preferred" positioning in Google.
If in six months after you complete these changes you are not laughing your way to the bank, you need to revisit how well you executed this four-step plan... Put simply: it works!
