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Increase ROI On Your Marketing Efforts this Holiday Season
Perhaps you’re investing in affiliate marketing and have created some really captivating holiday banners for your affiliates, or maybe you’re investing a lot in PPC this holiday season.
Are you simply looking at whether a marketing effort is converting and bringing in sales? Are you ignoring the step-by-step process visitors are going through from the marketing effort, to final conversion point, and making some assumptions for why one marketing effort might be converting more effectively than another?
Don’t just look at conversion rates, bounce rates, and click through rates this holiday season. Become an investigative reporter and find some meaning behind WHY something is happening, instead of just acknowledging ‘WHAT’ is happening.
Let me help you with the first few steps. Start by looking at your top landing pages and highlight your top 3 landing pages. For each of these top landing pages, find out the traffic sources that are driving traffic to each page. If search is driving traffic, then dig deeper and find out what the top 5 – 10 traffic driving keywords are for these top landing pages.
Now, you need to make some assumptions about the motivations and needs of the visitors who are coming to these top landing pages from these sources. The keywords visitors are typing when searching can tell us a lot about what they are looking for. The banner ad or other marketing efforts might be using specific language that can tell us a lot about what the visitor was hoping to find when she clicked.
Once you have come up with some ideas about the motivations and needs your visitors have when they come from the marketing effort to your landing pages, you need to follow through and determine if you’re effectively speaking to these needs and motivations on these top landing pages when the visitor gets there.
Are you featuring some of the keywords they were searching for, or that you used in the marketing effort to persuade her to click, in headlines on the landing page? Are you effectively providing the visitor various ways to navigate and move forward based on their motivations and needs? Are you providing a look and feel that is consistent with the marketing efforts or what the visitor is searching for?
At FutureNow, we help our clients increase their conversion rates and optimize their web sites by analyzing each site based on how existing visitors are coming to the site and what the visitors are looking to accomplish when they get there. One of the highest impact areas of your site are the top landing pages. You can get the best “bang for your buck” by providing more effective ’scent of information’ from your marketing efforts to your landing pages. You’ll not only experience lower bounce rates, but you’ll also reduce the likelihood that the visitor will drop out at the next click, because you’ll be leading her down the path she wanted, and expected, to follow.
About the author
Melissa is a Senior Persuasion Analyst at FutureNow.
More articles from Melissa Burdon
- Nobody wants to read your sh**!September 21st, 2009
- Redesign? Ask The Right Questions!September 18th, 2009
- Cross-post: How to Improve a Product Page, Part 1September 15th, 2009
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December 7th, 2009
9:56 am
Thank you for this informative post. I’m study these techniques to increase my exposure as well.
December 7th, 2009
5:17 pm
Great information on looking deeper at landing pages and how they effect your ROI. Thank you.
December 7th, 2009
9:44 pm
Good post but I am seeing a drop in PPC traffic over the holidays
December 8th, 2009
1:54 am
Thanks for your information. will look further at your futurenow how you can help us on increasing ROI.
December 8th, 2009
6:36 am
Strangely enough, we’ve experienced an increase in visitors to our sites but a decrease in conversions. We’d have thought more people would be buying this close to xmas. Hopefully it will turn itself round soon.
December 8th, 2009
3:18 pm
good and useful post
thanks
htttp://www.helmenaa.com
December 8th, 2009
4:26 pm
Thank so much,Very Good Article
December 9th, 2009
12:46 am
it is so useful, thanks..
December 9th, 2009
9:10 am
It’s very important to try to “get in the head of your prospects”.
Once you do this, you can understand what they need and what motivate them to buy. This is when you really start to see more profits in your business,
Franck
December 9th, 2009
11:08 am
nice info, maybe useful for me..
December 9th, 2009
11:40 am
It is always important to investigate why something is not working the way that it should. Many times it is something that might be able to be easily fixed.
December 9th, 2009
3:21 pm
The tips and information here are right on. Thanks for the info and it is so true, alot of times simple easy fixes and tweaks make all the difference.
December 10th, 2009
2:46 am
Thank you Melissa for the tips given.I think you hit the nail on the head when you say that it is not the “what” but the “why” in our marketing efforts.Why did the customer click there,why did the customer find this headline more appealing etc. Understanding the why will automatically increase conversions.
December 11th, 2009
1:29 am
Thanks for sharing, Guam Page.
December 11th, 2009
1:30 am
Thanks for the info, MagicStix.
December 11th, 2009
1:30 am
Great post, Guam Chat.
December 11th, 2009
1:32 am
Thanks a bunch, Kalakas 671.
December 11th, 2009
9:55 am
Thanks, taht’s very valuable information for me. I’m just looking for a good guide in marketing techniques.
December 11th, 2009
4:48 pm
Melissa, you had me interested in reading the full story when I saw you mentioned affiliate marketing in first paragraph. But in your example you just mention analyzing search terms. If I’m doing affiliate marketing and notice a single campaign converting better from some affiliates than others, what should I be looking at to understand why?
December 16th, 2009
8:02 am
I love this post ^^
December 16th, 2009
7:11 pm
Thank for useful tips, myself on the holiday marketing battle now
December 20th, 2009
9:23 am
Great article thanks for sharing
December 20th, 2009
10:11 pm
yes…this is an ongoing analysis approaches that you shared to us to ensure the traffic will convert into sales…
thanks…
Make A Solar Panel
December 31st, 2009
11:19 am
A very insightful article
January 5th, 2010
8:18 am
Thank so much,very Good Article
January 26th, 2010
6:04 am
[...] here, you may want to subscribe to The NMS Blog newsletter. Thanks for visiting!Recently, I wrote a blog post about looking at the data in your analytics to understand not only what is happening in the most [...]
January 31st, 2010
6:14 am
That is a nice article to start business online. Here, I know more about the affiliation and other online business.
February 26th, 2010
7:52 pm
Great post again! Thank you. It is always important to investigate why something is not working the way that it should. Many times it is something that might be able to be easily fixed.
March 7th, 2010
9:28 am
To maximize success and achieve scale, automated bid management systems can be deployed. These systems can be used directly by the advertiser, though they are more commonly used by advertising agencies that offer PPC bid management as a service.
March 30th, 2010
3:58 pm
Great advice about the keywords. I will try to integrate as many of the top 5-10 keywords (people search to find my site) as possible on my top landing page. Otherwise, I can see how people may lose interest and click away.
April 7th, 2010
10:39 am
Yes, I agree that keyword is the top important factor to increase the conversion rates and website optimization…
April 8th, 2010
12:47 am
It is true that we have to increase ROI on our marketing efforts for the coming holiday season. Lots of important factors to be implemented to gain our web optimized