Effective Search Advertising Demands an Effective Conversion Enhancement Strategy By Sage Peterson February 2004
$5 bucks a click. $2 bucks a click - even 50 cents a click is a lot to pay for a visitor to a Web site. If your conversion rate is 1%
to 2% you are paying between $50 to $500 for every sale you make at the rates I just described. If you double your conversion rate you just
cut the cost of a Web site sale in half. Double it again, and PPC search advertising starts to make your Web site chime like a cash
register.
With the increase in spending on paid search advertising, a Web site's conversion rate is the gas pedal, or in some cases the brake, of your
marketing campaign. After all, according to a study by Stat Market, the "average" Web site converts visitors at an anemic 1.8%.
Just so we're all on the same page, that means that fully 98.2% of all of the clicks that you pay for from Google AdWords or Overture are
visiting your Web site and not buying anything, not signing up for anything or just taking a peek and turning around and leaving. That's
quite a lot of money to pay for hundreds of window shoppers and the occasional buyer.
There are several types of conversion improvement strategies available to Web site owners - some work better than others depending on your
situation.
1. Traffic Optimization: this is the strategy that most search advertising companies offer under the heading of "conversion
improvement services." Here, the conversion rate is improved by doing a better job of targeting keywords that send higher quality
traffic - traffic that is more likely to buy, e.g., they searched on the phrase, "buy widget online right now." They also are
more vigilant in removing keywords from your campaign that send traffic that does not buy - not rocket science, but worthwhile.
In some sense, this is only an apparent or incremental improvement in conversion rate. The visitors that know exactly what they
want are a minority of visitors to your site. This minority are ready to buy and more likely to convert because they are already
motivated. The more substantive improvement in conversion rate results from persuading a percentage of the majority of visitors
who come to your site and want to buy but aren't sure or who are browsing.
2. Scenario Optimization: I call this the "Chutes and Ladders" pathway optimization tactic. Here, the strategy is to watch
the traffic as it flows through your existing, and in some cases ineffective, Web site -- studying the click-path and where the
visitor seems to abandon the site. In a sense, you're re-arranging the doors, hoping the visitor will flow through your Web site
following some "magical" combination of pages that leads to the highest conversion rate. This strategy seeks to optimize the paths
to conversion without addressing what may be wrong with the content itself. Again, as in the "Traffic Optimization" model, you are
tuning your site for those visitors that are there to buy. Clearly, the visitors that are prepared to convert will manifest that
behavior in the web logs. If you optimize based on the web logs, your site will be structured, and will work well, for a small
percentage of the visitors. As a result you ignore, and often even create impediments for, the majority of visitors who need to
go through a more extended, persuasive buying process.
3. Landing Page Optimization: Here, the search engine marketing firm fiddles with the landing page believing that a better
placement of content or price, or graphics will improve the conversion rate - and it works to some extent, especially with
low-cost, commodity products or for online catalog retailers. However, when dealing with a "considered purchase" or any purchase
that requires some education and comfort level before buying, people rarely buy after viewing just one page of content. In these
cases, you are only converting those visitors who were already in the buying mode by removing obstacles to purchases, but not by
addressing the content or your Web site.
4. Web Site Conversion Enhancement: This strategy is the only one that truly considers the buyer - and not just one, but
groups of buyers and the information they need to arrive at a purchase decision. This methodology will require the most time
on the part of the Web site owner because in addition to defining a number of "personas" that represent different members of
your audience, it frequently requires you to re-architect your site - not for look and feel but for content. Here the strategy
is to create a persuasive architecture that matches the website's selling process with the preferences and expectations of the
buyer. This involves developing content for each segment of buyers that speaks to them in their words, and takes them through
their buying process, giving them the information they require at each stage of the buying process.
The strategy that produces the greatest improvement in conversion rate, the "Conversion Enhancement" strategy, is also the most time
consuming and can take as long as six months to bear fruit. However, we have witnessed conversion rates grow from 2% to as high as 19%
under this strategy.
To over-simplify this process, imagine a Web site that offers student loans. Most Web sites you will visit scream, "Welcome! We can help
you with Stafford loans and other loans to help you get your kid through school!" However, the Web site has at least three distinct
audiences, including parents, students and guidance counselors. The conversion enhancement strategy would address each group based on their
buying behavior and offer each group a path to a conversion based on the information they needed to make a buying decision. Parents have
very different worries and needs about student loans than do students, and guidance counselors who will never actually apply for a loan,
need very different information in order to be a recommender of a loan product. Persuading these different audiences by addressing the
emotional content of decision making and speaking the language of benefits will produce higher conversion rates.
Some e-Commerce Web sites may be able to pursue a Traffic Optimization or Landing Page optimization strategy and make sufficient progress to
justify the investment in those strategies, too. It all depends on how well or poorly your site currently converts traffic.
Remember though, if you are paying for every click, you really need to make every click count. The conversion rate of your Web site is the
lever that allows you as a marketer to control the productivity and value of your Web site.
