Well if it’s not Click Fraud, it must be landing
pages March 1, 2007
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Click fraud has been used as a scapegoat for many pay per click (PPC) campaign’s
shortcomings, but recent press releases cite click fraud as only a very small
percentage of the clicks that a pay per click campaign will receive and not the
problem as hyped in many of the industry and trade magazines. According to an
article by Enquiro’s Gord Hotchkiss, citing interviews with top click fraud
experts from Yahoo, MSN and Google; click fraud accounts for only 0.02% of
clicks. So now that the scapegoat is effectively dead, its time to look to
conversion paths and landing pages.
The landing page is the second point of interaction with the consumer, the PPC
ad on the SERP was the first. However, the landing page is incredibly important
in achieving the desired results for a Pay Per Click (PPC) campaign; it can be
the vital difference between realizing return on investment and realizing you’ve
made a mistake.
Landing pages should be created with the conversion in mind. What is it that you
want the user to do once they have hit your landing page? Far too often PPC ads
are directed to home pages or to other keyword related pages within the site,
however, a landing page should be created to immediately receive the user from
the PPC ad and immediately provide the information promised in the PPC ad. If
your ad has a “buy now” call to action, the landing page should be the beginning
of the purchase process, if the ad copy promises specific product information,
the information should be the on the landing page.
The quality and content of the landing page are the key determinants of whether
the user will stay on the site or click the back button. It’s easy to blame
click fraud for pages with high bounce rates, but even easier to create a
terrible landing pages.
The most common cause for conversion abandonment is the inability for the
landing page to develop enough trust with the user to make them feel confident
to move forward in following the conversion path. Landing pages should have a
professional look and feel to convey as much as possible the validity of the
organization. Any supporting information proving the validity of the
organization such as third party verification (Verisign, Truste), industry
accolades, professional accreditation and customer testimonials are valuable
resources to developing trust with your prospect and convincing them to follow
the conversion path.
Attention specifically needs to be placed on conversion rates with respect to
PPC campaigns. Defining what the conversion is and how to most effectively
measure the conversion is important in determining what the conversion rate is.
Whether the site is attempting to get registrations for leads or making high
value sales will affect conversion rates. Knowing what is important will define
your conversion point. With many B2B sales transactions, a lead can be the
important objective to move the sales process to the offline world, where most
B2B transactions are closed.
To measure conversion rates and conversion path abandonment, analytics packages
are required, such as Google Analytics, HitBox, or Omniture SiteCatalyst to
determine where the losses are occurring and what content is most important to
the user. It is also important to remember to track secondary and tertiary
conversions from a landing page as this will impact your overall conversion rate
and estimated ROI.
If they say an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, who cares about
0.02% if you can fix your landing pages and encourage more leads or sales –
consider that minimal percentage a tax write off.
Kyle
Grant
Sponsored
Search Marketing Strategist Search Engine Positioning by Searchengineposition
Enquiro Full Service Search Engine Marketing
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Kyle
Grant