An internet marketing initiative consists of many different components, which are all critical to a successful and effective campaign. For example: using the best keywords to describe your products and/or services, creating compelling and creative ad copy which stands out, and ultimately, selecting the most appropriate landing page to send a searcher to. Seems simple enough, right?
 
In most cases, many of my clients prefer to send all of their visitors to the home page of their site. This is not the best solution in terms of conversions, and here is why. For an Ecommerce site, you want to make it as easy as possible for someone to take advantage of your products/services. If your site is for lead generation purposes, you also want to make it simple for the intended action item (request more information, download a whitepaper, sign up for a newsletter, etc.) to take place. By sending visitors to the home page, you are “sort of assuming” that they will get to the page you want them to visit. So now you might be asking yourself, what is the best solution?

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A landing page is one of the most important aspects to think about when running a Search Engine Marketing (SEM) campaign. A landing page can determine whether or not the person that clicked on your ad will continue forward or abandon his/her search. The landing page is the specific web page that a visitor reaches after clicking on an ad. This is the first impression a visitor has of your website and your organization.

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During the time that I have been working with analytics, I have noticed a repetitive issue with forms and high bounce rates. The majority of my clients are service oriented and those who have analytics in place allow for a good evaluation of site exit points and pages with high bounce rates. Usually it is the form page that causes visitors to leave.

Frustration is the #1 cause for a user leaving a site -if the form is too long and/or asks for too much personal information. Also, irritating questions that require heavy typing can certainly lead to visitor frustrations that may result in abandonment. Clients who have made it all the way to your form page are definitely interested in your service/s and/or products. Don’t allow a bad form page to scare them away.

Let’s see what we can do in order to keep our visitors happy and wanting to fill out forms for us:

1) Align the fields in an organized way so everything is clean looking and easy to understand.
2) Keep it short-ask only for information that is necessary for a completion of the request.
3) Eliminate heavy typing- a drop down menu is a great solution.
4) Try to eliminate login and password creation to save time.

With these simple steps, you will be able to hold on to your prospects and reduce your bounce rates dramatically!