My dog is your typical dog. Actually, I take that back…if you could take the best qualities from every dog in the world and lump them all together, that would be my dog. She is beautiful, sweet, and she always does exactly what I tell her; most times what I want her to before I even say it. If you told my dog to click on your ad and go to your website and buy your product, you know what? She would. Probably buy two just to make you happy.
If only our beloved searchers were like my dog. Alas, most of them are much more similar to my cat. She will also do what I want, provided it’s the one time a year or so that our wants align. Otherwise, she pretty much laughs in my face. Take, for example, the only real rule I really try to “enforce” with my cats: stay off the counters and kitchen table. I’ve tried foil, I’ve tried nasty tasting sprays, I’ve tried yelling and spraying water. I clearly just haven’t found the right thing to motivate her to do what I want her to do.
If your searchers are like my cat, you have your work cut out for you. Sure, they might click on an ad, but you bet your tail they’re not going to convert unless THEY want to. And the goodies had better be there every step of the way to keep them moving in the direction you want them to.
This brings me to my point (finally! you say) – how do we get those naughty cats of the world to do what we want them to do?
Let’s take this opportunity to go back to Search 101.
First, let’s talk landing pages:
We recently had a client who wanted us to optimize the pages of their site for Paid Search…shortly after they just did a huge revamp based on Organic optimizations. This was an interesting request to me because we’re not in the business of consulting clients on their website based on Paid search. Typically, if your site had good design and development, is user friendly, and optimized for Organic, all your paid search team needs to do is make sure they are matching up the keywords and the creative with the best landing pages. So what would I recommend? Make your site’s usability, content, structure, tags, links and so on superb based on organic recommendations. If this stuff is done correctly, you’ll see more conversions out of your paid search account.
What about the ads?
Don’t be afraid of changing your creative! This is a fairly simple way to boost your clicks and relevancy. Testing creative is always a good idea instead of implementing changes without comparing them to what you were doing previously. Some tips on creative testing:
- Don’t forget to turn off the option where the engines will serve the best performing creative the most. You want them to rotate your ads evenly, so you get a true test of what works better.
- Run your creative test for at least a month.
- Have a professional analytics team help you with determining which performed the best.
- Measure the performance at the keyword conversion level- not by clicks or CTR!
And don’t forget the calls to action…
It’s important to remember a few things here. The first is you should not expect every keyword to warrant the same call to action. Look at your search funnel and buying phases. Some keywords will encourage more research, while others will encourage a direct purchase. Another important aspect of getting people to convert is making it easy for them to do so. You can make it easy from the start by making your keywords, creative and landing pages super relevant. This way, you won’t make people mad when they are looking for a particular cell phone model but are taken to a page about service plans. On the site-end of this, it’s important to make sure forms are as short as possible, navigation works correctly, shopping carts and check-outs are seamless, etc. If you make it difficult or complicated, your searchers will go elsewhere. The Internet boomed because it made our lives convenient. So don’t make me work to buy those boots!
When performance slips, go back to the basics of Search 101 and get re-focused on common sense ideas.
Now for the bad news…a few months ago, I was 100% convinced that these tactics would be enough to improve an ailing search account. However, thanks to some recent changes within the engines, I’m not entirely sure that these supposedly tried and true practices can even help you.
Be sure to check back tomorrow for more details on that; and, yes, a major objective of this post was to work in a conversation about my animals.
Here’s the infamous Mini Mouse, all ready for Halloween:
Just get rid of the cat. Problem solved.