Tracking Ads and Landing Pages

In the last chapter, we talked about split testing your ads as a means of continuously improving the CTR for your keywords. You can apply the same principle (of steady improvement) to your whole AdWords campaign, and today, we're going to learn how to do just that.

There are three specific parts of your campaign that you can keep improving:

• Your keywords creating focused keyword lists (discussed in chapter 3).
• Your ads (split testing discussed in chapter 4)
• Your conversion rate how your keywords convert into sales and the effectiveness of your landing page (discussed today, chapter 5).

In this chapter we'll discuss two major topics how to measure the conversion rate of your landing page, and what to do to improve it quickly and easily.

Landing Page Basics

What is a landing page, and why is it so important?

A landing page is a web page that your prospects (the traffic that you are driving to your website) will land upon after clicking through your ads. It is the 'destination URL' field in your AdWords ads.

Depending upon the type of product / service you are promoting, the landing page could ask the user to do any one of the following:

• Subscribe to a newsletter
• Buy a product
• Download trial software

And more basically, any visitor action that you would want taken place on your website.

The look, feel, content, quality and focus of your landing page is critical in making sales if the landing page is not able to 'hold the visitor's attention' and convince him to buy your product, not only have you not made a sale (when you had the chance to do so) but you have also lost some money.

Not all clicks will produce conversions. That means that in order for your marketing campaign to turn a profit, you have to make more sales than you spend on ads (i.e. bringing in traffic). And since selling products is not always easy, you should always be improving your landing page (and thus trying to improve your conversion rate) in order to make more money out of AdWords.

Conversion Rate: The rate at which people purchase your products. For example, if you got 100 visitors to your website and 2 people purchased your product then your conversion rate would be 2%. (2/100 = .02)

How can I make sure that visitors to my site buy from me

Quite simply find out what works best, and then meticulously apply that on your website. There are two approaches to doing this:

• You can learn from your industry (by observing your competition) and from marketing experts who have a proven track record of success in improving conversion rates
• You can test different configurations on your own landing pages and then track the results.

In practice, you would be doing both applying what you've learned from the experts, and tracking actual conversions to evaluate how you can improve on them.

Conversion tracking is in fact one of the most underused and important tool in AdWords. It lets you track the performance for each ad group (that is, each landing page) and also allows you to see how traffic from different keywords react to the same landing page.

The importance of conversions can be traced to one simple principle no matter what your ad position or CTR, without conversions you are simply spending money on ads that do not make any sales.

Use conversion tracking to help you improve the selling power of your website here's a look at how to use Google's ad tracking code on your website.