SAN JOSE, CA — Getting users to click on your search ad is only one piece of the puzzle: the real challenge lies in converting them into buyers.
Panelists at SES San Jose discussed ways to test and tweak landing pages to get conversions.
“If your site’s conversion rate is low, you can’t control cost traffic to your site and this is costing you a lot of money, you should be tuning your Web site,” said Tim Ash, president of Site Tuners, San Diego, CA.
The problem lies in catching people’s attention on your site.
“If you can’t catch people’s attention with your page,” said Scott Miller, CEO of Vertster, Salt Lake City, UT, “how do you convert them?”
The logo, headline, images, audio and video elements need to work together and be believable, clear and relevant, Mr. Miller said.
Interactions are very important, said Mr. Ash. In other words the picture and the text above it on a site should interact.
A good way to get users to spend more time on a site is through offers. Price promotions, scarcity, risk reversals and value propositions are all attention grabbers, Mr. Miller said.
“It’s kind of like supply and demand,” said Mr. Miller. “When the supply goes down, the demand shoots up.
“So if you say that there is a limited supply or a limited time to the offer, the demand will go up,” he said.
Jamie Roche, president of Offermatica, San Francisco, CA, said that if you decide to use a product to do the testing for you, make sure that it won’t affect your search engine ranking.
“[In addition,] it is important to make sure that any promotions are visible,” Mr. Roche said. “In fact, it is not a bad idea to repeat special offers on multiple pages.”
