After the Jump – Optimizing the Customer Journey

In PPC, we can research our keywords, analyze our competitors, optimize our PPC advert and carefully manage the budget of PPC adverts we run.  All of these factors, performed with expert precision, will ensure the maximum amount of motivated visitors visit our site through PPC adverts with the minimum spend.

On Site Optimization

This is, however, only half of the battle.  Once we have visitors in our grasp, we have to convert them into paying customers.  It is possible that your PPC ads are setup to build brand trust and are therefore not entirely motivated to get an instant sale.  Few people would click on a PPC advert and instantly decide to purchase say, a house.  You may be hoping the customer will return to your site later and are simply building brand trust, but for the purposes of this discussion we will focus on a common idea that you want customers to reach your payment page as quickly as possible with a mindset to buy your product, download your software or sign up for your newsletter etc.

Whereas we typically use tracking tools in Google AdSense to monitor our PPC ads off-site, it is equally important to monitor what is happening once the customer reaches your site.  Tools to do so have become increasingly sophisticated.  Where we used to monitor which pages were being accessed using simple page statistic software, tools such as Google Analytics can be expertly setup to keep an eye on visitors every move.

The Effective Use of Web Analytics

It takes a bit of setting up, but Analytics can show you exactly where customers are heading after they reach your landing page.  A typical setup would be to setup your payment page as a ‘goal’, and all of the pages on the journey to this goal as necessary steps the customers need to go through to reach that goal.  Arguably, in most cases this journey should be as short as possible, as we will lose more customers the more clicks they have to go through to get to this goal.  However, sometimes multiple pages are required, either to build up trust or to garner necessary information from customers.

All of these steps should be setup as a separate part of the journey so they can be monitored as a funnel.  In this way, for example, we could see that 90% of people reached the landing page by searching for ‘discount photo albums’, 30% of people continued past the landing page to specify which type of photo album they were looking to purchase, and 5% of people ultimately made an order.

Landing Page Optimization

This is, of course, highly valuable information, but it only scrapes the surface of what can be achieved by monitoring what people are doing once they reached your landing page.  For example, if it is clear that people are reaching the site from what appears to be a highly motivated to buy key-phrase but are not going further than the second page in our ‘funnel’, then we can focus on this second page to see where the problem may lie.  Tools can show us where people are clicking on the page – perhaps they are being distracted by something which takes them to another part of the site, or they are seemingly confused or put off by marketing blurb.  Once identified, forms, content and buttons can be refined to make the process clearer and simpler.

Monitoring and refining your landing page and conversion process will mean all the difference between a non-existent conversion rate, and a business that is booming.  Once you have refined the process from end-to-end, there is nothing stopping you from receiving a healthy, steady stream of conversions.

About the Author

Claire Jarrett runs Marketing By Web, a PPC Management and SEO Management company based in Bristol in the UK.

Tagged As: Conversion rate, Google Analytics, Internet marketing, Landing page, Web Design and Development