Managing a Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising account in Google AdWords with multiple campaigns for many different products isn’t always straightforward. Sometimes even after you know you have selected the best keywords, created tight ad groups and optimized the ads for click-through-rate (CTR) you still don’t see conversions. This is when you should ask “what does my paid search visitor really want?” Going into your Web analytics tool (such as Google Analytics) can help answer this. Looking at the bounce rates for AdWords keywords in Google Analytics and the search queries users typed in to see your ads can help you figure out where to focus your attention. This data can point you to the problem landing pages, but from there you will probably need to make some changes to the page or ads.
Here’s an idea: why not just ask the customers what they want? Web forms are priceless marketing tools that enable the customer to tell you what they’re looking for. For us, adding a custom web form from 123ContactForm to our site helped improve the efficiency of our Google AdWords investment by turning bounces into leads.
Round 1: Improving the Landing Page
We started a pay-per-click advertising campaign for our promotional calendars in August 2011 and quickly learned that something was wrong. Over 44% of paid visitors with the keywords “custom” and “calendars” coming to our calendars page were bouncing. We were pretty sure that our offerings were indeed relevant to “custom calendars,” so why was this happening?
The AdWords Search Term report is one of Google’s greatest gifts to search marketers. This report tells you exactly what your visitors search before seeing your ad and clicking through to your site. That is where we found the answer to “why was this happening?” A large number of user search queries had words such as “make your own,” “create your own,” “design your own,” etc. These visits that we paid for were from users looking for something that HALO offered – totally customizable calendars – but we failed to provide the means for them to get what they wanted on our site. We had three subcategories at the time: budget calendars, desk calendars and wall calendars. Here is what the landing page looked like at the time:
To better serve these dissatisfied visitors, we added a “design your own” custom calendars subcategory on the promotional calendars category page. Here is the new landing page:
Round 2: Turning Clicks into Leads
We wanted a way to tell the prospects that we could help them design a completely custom calendar and at the same time wanted to give them the opportunity to tell us more about what they needed. A get-quote form from 123ContactForm was the perfect solution.
123ContactForm is a free web form builder that helps businesses create any type of web form without knowledge of coding. For us, this service made it incredibly easy to design our own form and integrate it onto our new Custom Calendars subcategory page for a great price. Their form tools enable us to automatically send the clients’ form data directly to our custom calendar quote manager. 123ContactForm also gives us the ability to track the form submission data with their online reports and in our analytics platform that we use for HALO.com.
Here is their get-quote form in action on the HALO.com Custom Calendars subcategory page:
Now we are ready for another PPC calendar test.
The Results
We restarted our PPC advertising for calendars again in July of 2012, and the results speak for themselves.
We saw a 21% decline in bounce rate and a 51% increase in time spent on HALO.com after adding the new subcategory page. Of the 65% of visitors that stayed on HALO.com, 59% of them navigated to the new Custom Calendars subcategory page (38% of total visitors)!
There is one more step left before we can pat ourselves on the back, and fortunately the get-quote form from 123ContactForms brought it home:
18% of the paid visitors that reached the Custom Calendars subcategory page submitted a form (7% of total visitors)! With a few simple changes to the landing page and the integration of a form we were able to turn dissatisfied visitors into leads for our HALO calendars team. It should be noted that the calendars team had zero custom calendar leads from our site before we added this page and quote request form on HALO.com.
Good things happen when you give your visitors what they want.
