What Does It Mean If Your Ad Click Through Rates Are Sky High But Conversions Are Low And How You Can Fix It
Here is a common scenario: You make a marketing plan to sell your product or service, create a website, do all the right things to optimize your website, choose all the right keywords, plan a pay per click program with Google. You launch, and wait for those leads to come flying in. You are sure you are on the road to success and big bucks!
But after a couple of days with very few leads coming in you are dismayed. You look at your website metrics and see that a lot of people are clicking through your website, but the conversion rate is horrible, and the few that did convert and fill out your form are unqualified for your service. Meanwhile Google is costing you a bundle. “What’s wrong?” you ask yourself.
The answer almost always is that the web page copy is weak or in some cases non existent. In order to get conversions that will support the cost of pay per click advertising you need to engage your prospect with your ad copy. Tell a story, emotionalize their pain, and make them feel a connection with you and your company. You must be able in your copy to answer the question: “Why should I do business with you, instead of all the other choices, including doing nothing at all?”
This is pervasive mistake among many types of businesses trying to get leads over the internet. For example, look at the mortgage business. If you look up the term ‘home loans’ on any search engine, you will find thousands of websites as a result of that search. When you click on them, most will be a form for you to fill out with a thousand questions, and some graphics like puppies running across a lawn or something else equally ineffective. Very few of them will ever try to tell you why you should fill out their form instead of any of the others.
Real estate websites also make this mistake. They want all your contact information without telling you what they can do for you, or they use the most useless phrases ever seen on a website. “Our service is the best” many claim, or they tell you that they have 10 years experience. Both of these claims are meaningless and roll off your prospect like water off a duck’s back.
Writing effective, emotionally engaging copy is sometimes tricky; it is truly a learned art. If you don’t know how or don’t want to do it by yourself, hire a copywriter to do it for you. Good copywriters are not cheap, but they will always pay for themselves many times over in the change in your conversion rates.
When your copy makes that emotional connection and your prospect is moved to act by contacting you, or filling out your online form, they arrive pre-screened, pre-qualified, and predisposed to do business with you. Not only will your conversion rate improve, but so will your rate of converting leads into sales, which in the end is what it’s really all about.
Be sure to see next months issue of this newsletter, where we will share with you some of the important elements of direct response copywriting and how to construct or improve your landing page content to maximize conversions.
- RSS Ray
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