Shaping Your Marketing Message - 3 Tips for Improving Conversion

Understanding how visitors will view your sales message - and how they'll respond to it - is a challenging prospect for any online retailer. But studying consumer behavior can help you make adjustments to your marketing campaign that will improve your click through rate and help you convert more shoppers into buyers. Here are three tips to help you maximize your marketing dollars:

. Continually Listen to Your Visitors
A/B testing is a great way to discover which of your PPC ads are converting effectively. But just because you find an ad that works well doesn't mean you should stop testing all together. Once you've identified which creative ads serve you best, you can continue split testing by creating ten ads - nine of them identical to your proven ad, and one of them different. This allows you, not only to continue introducing new ideas into your campaign and testing them in isolation, but also to maintain your business' cash flow by sending ninety percent of your traffic to the ad version with the proven, solid click through and conversion rates.

. Match Your Message to Your Market
When a user clicks through one of your ads, you can't expect them to search around your site for the information they want - you have to take them right to it. It does you no good to research the right keywords to attract buyers, only to send them to a page showing them a totally disassociated product. You're just wasting their time and your money.

Studies show that over half of the effectiveness of a PPC ad depends on the landing page. It's not enough to throw out the same ad for a bunch of different keywords, and send every user who clicks through straight to your home page. Every core keyword you bid on should have an ad created specially for it, and should send your visitors to the page on your web site that is most directly related.

. Divide and Conquer
Getting users to click through to your site is only half the battle. You still have to convince them to stay and buy, or you've just wasted the cost of a click. Studies have proven that you have eight seconds from the time a user lands to convince them you have the information they want.

As you design your site, keep in mind that visitors are consuming your content in a very specific way. When viewing a computer monitor, the human eye can only focus on an area about one hundred fifty pixels wide by seventy-five pixels high, at any given time. You need to design your landing pages in small, easily digestible pieces that users can quickly absorb without actually sitting down and reading. Any specific messages that you want to convey immediately, such as "Free Shipping" or "100% Money Back Guarantee", you need to deliver in rectangular chunks with dimensions no greater than one hundred fifty by seventy five pixels.

Constantly examining your promotional vehicles, and modifying them with your visitors in mind, should result in a very streamlined sales campaign. You're always testing and researching to understand your buyers' behavior. When you know what buyers are looking for, and how they're going to react to something, you're able to design truly effective ads that are going to convert at a very solid rate.