So, my question is where do I start? I think I need to start with making some changes to the site but I'm not sure what to do.
Appreciated would be suggestions of what I should do.
Go back to basic in adjusting your (one-page) website. Try to follow the rules for landing page design.
- Use the regular marketing concept of AIDA
- Be brief in copywriting
- Ad visuals of the product if possible (e.g. screenshots of your books)
- Make sure that a site visitor can make an intuitive call to action (buy your books)
- Use an incentive for the call to action (e.g. promotional offer)
So, design your sales page in a way, that people want to stay there, want to read what you offer and want to buy!
Site-optimization should imho be part of the standard services of a PPC-professional in order to implement and run a profitable campagne for your customers. At least this something we strive for.
1. think about who is visiting the page, exactly what information they need to convert, and exactly how you can get that information across to them in the best way possible to get them to convert.
2. what possible roadblocks are there on the page/site which may be causing people not to convert? remove these - 1 at a time - and measure whether there's a positive/negative impact on your numbers.
3. as above, but with 'features' of the page/site: test different features (eg. copy, headlines, navigational elements, placements of images/conversion buttons), &c. and measure whether your conversions are moving up or down.
4. get visitors to provide their email address & opt in to receive email from you wherever possible. that way you can repeat market to them & increase your conversion.
5. figure out a way of getting non-buyers to tell you why they aren't buying, so you can fix the problems. This could be (for example) by giving them a free chapter of an ebook in return for them answering a few questions that will help you to understand their behaviour.
Question: On the page in question, I have the links out to the various merchants open a new browser window. Is this a good / not a good idea? Do popup blockers block new windows?
Improving your conversions always starts at your website...
I think that is only half of it.
Another key factor - especially with the new keyword tool - is NEGATIVE keywords.
A while back we found some terms that had extremely poor conversion rates, but found out that a large part of the problem was false hits from searches that included similar terms. Putting in some negative keywords to exclude those almost doubled our conversion rate, and reduced our expenses for those keywords a lot.
