It’s no secret that effective ads and landing pages are crucial to the success of your search engine marketing efforts. Perhaps you’ve already created compelling copy relevant to your keywords, achieved top positions on the search results pages, and optimized the design and usability of your landing pages. All of this may have increased your site’s traffic and conversions, but do you still want more? Try offering an incentive.

Appealing incentives are proven to persuade searchers to not only click on your ads but also convert once they arrive at your landing page. Depending on the nature of your business, you can offer a free white paper or book, discount, web special, complementary product or accessory, gift, or free shipping to boost conversions. According to an article in Practical eCommerce, 84% of online shoppers surveyed during last year’s holiday season said they were most influenced by free shipping offers, while 77% cited sales and specials as their strongest motivators.

However, when it comes to determining the ideal incentive for your site, it’s best to test. Remember that while an incentive is a value-add for your customers, it’s also an incremental cost to you. That’s why it’s important to consider how it affects your bottom line. A recent study in Marketing Experiments Journal confirms that conversion rate alone cannot indicate which incentive has the most positive impact on net profit. Instead, the journal recommends using Return-On-Incentive, or ROIc, to measure this. Simply stated, the ROIc is the net cost of the incentive subtracted from its net profit. For instance, a free shipping offer might result in more conversions, but a free gift might be a better incentive because it yields a higher ROIc. Check out the study to learn more about calculating ROIc and using it to test two or more incentives.

Are you utilizing incentives to your advantage today?

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?

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »