Search Engine Optimization News Blog

The San Jose Session hit home with a revealing layout of information on conversion. Many advertisers are now paying much higher rates for conversions than for clicks, as ways to game the system cause trust on advertisements to plummet.

If you are concerned about your conversion rate for your own product, you are probably in the same boat, with your budget eaten up with clicks that ultimately return no results.

Brett Crosby, Group Manager for Google shared some thoughts on how to focus your site and landing pages to identify where possible conversions are just slipping through your fingers.

Google released a tool in April to make tracking conversions easier, and recommends working several campaigns at once to narrow down what techniques work best.

At the SES, Bryan Eisenberg went over several ways to identify spots in your site that could be causing you to lose conversions, and revealed the time to focus on is after that second click, which is the make it or break it point for many conversion scenarios.

10% of searchers abandon after the first click, usually because the site did not suit their needs at first glance. In this case, the ads need to be better targeted for higher quality traffic.

Alternately, the landing page did not accurately capture the searchers attention with relevant content or graphics. This usually just means that you need to tweak your landing pages to match search criteria.

55% of searchers abandon after the second click, where most of your bounce traffic is. The best tactic to take is to track navigation within your site, and see where visitors are leaving, unsatisfied with results.

After the third click, the abandon rate drops back to 16%, so past the second click could considerably increase conversion and ROI, said Eisenberg. Crosby added that a professional appearance, about you page, contact information and testimonials are crucial to gaining and building trust.

The session went on to lay out various methods for increasing conversion rates and revenues through enhancing an already profitable site, and suggested ways to turn a new or struggling site into a solid moneymaker.

Eisenberg stressed relevance and trust, and Crosby echoed it - without both components, conversion rates will be low. Webmasters need to take this into account as pay per click becomes less effective and pay per conversion becomes the focus to drive many sites.