How to Improve Your Conversion rate

[By the Microsoft AdCenter]

Are customers buying what your selling? No? If your ads have a good click-through rate (CTR) but their conversion rate is low, it's time to take a hard look at your landing page.
Here's some ideas to help you improve your landing page performance:

• Make it relevant. For each ad, be sure you're sending potential customers to a landing page with content that's relevant to their search keyword. If they don't quickly see what they were expecting, there's a good chance they'll abandon your site. adCenter has a great way to help. It's called dynamic text and it can work wonders by sending customers to a specific page within your website based on their search keyword.  Similarly, if your site displays ads or outward-bound links, be sure that it also contains significant and unique content that shows visitors what they came for. A site that focuses more on its unique content than on having visitors click ads is more likely to give you those conversions.
  
• Make it fast. Make sure your landing page loads quickly. Many people abandon a website that isn't displayed within a few seconds. Test the loading time of your landing page. If it's slow, try reducing the number of graphic images or taking other appropriate measures to help it load faster.
• Make it interesting. Give visitors something to do on the page. Let them purchase a product, conduct research, place a reservation, sign up for a service, take a quiz, or create an account.
• Display a highly visible action button. If you're selling a product on the landing page, use a graphic image that has action words such as "buy" or "order." Place that image "above the fold" in a prominent location. The same advice goes for placing a reservation, creating an account, etc.
• Make the purchase process easy to follow. Review your customer's likely experience of buying your product, right down to the shopping cart. If anything is difficult along the way, you risk losing a valuable customer who's ready and willing to buy.
• Improve the organization. Is the landing page unnecessarily complex or disorganized? You want potential customers to quickly locate what they're looking for without scrolling or clicking to other pages. Make sure critical information, such as product information and incentives, is displayed on the first page they see (or "above the fold").
• Spell out your product's benefits. This is advertising 101. Make a clear connection between your product's features and its benefits to your customers. Include a call to action, and create a sense of urgency by using words such as "now" or "today."
• Build trust with potential customers. Provide information about credit card security, shipping costs, and your return policy.
• Don't use gimmicks. Avoid pop-up or pop-under ads, soundtracks that play automatically, back-button blocks, or unsolicited changes to your visitors' computer settings. If you collect personally identifiable information (PII), include a privacy policy and link to it prominently. Clearly let visitors know if you will sell or share their information.
• Include keywords in landing page text. A bit off-topic, but important to mention nonetheless: To help get your keywords approved, be sure to include all of them on your landing page. Note that site crawlers do not "read" text that's embedded in images or JavaScript, so your keywords must appear as text within one or more of these HTML tags:
  • Description meta tag
  • Keywords meta tag
  • Paragraph tag
  • Image tag (in the ALT attribute)
  • Title tag
  • List item tag
  • Heading tags
  Using this trick to get keywords approved is just the start. By including your keywords, you'll also increase the relevance of your landing page for those keywords, which can improve your ad's position and even possibly boost your CTR.
• Last, but not least, follow the rules. adCenter doesn't allow certain types of advertising content. To sail through the review process, make sure that your website content follows the adCenter Editorial Guidelines.