Trust me, it does!

This is one of the most neglected areas in user experience optimization and in most cases people don’t pay much heed to the thank you page and in the process loses tons of opportunity! E-commerce industry is an exception as most e-commerce websites follow up their thank you pages with complementary products and special offers trying to up sell.

Optimize thank you page design to increase user engagement.

This attitude of negligence mainly stems from the facts..

1. The user has already converted (your business objective fulfilled) – why do you care anymore? You assume he is going to leave your website at this point.
2. Thank you pages are mostly dynamically generated and hidden from the search engines, so there is no SEO benefit to it.

What you fail to see in this case are..

1. If the user has converted once, it means he has got some trust on you. Why not build up on it and make him a loyal engaged user?
2. Thank You page may not be visible to search engines but it can still work as a gateway for your users to discover your other valuable content.

In this article, I will try to layout a few basic aspects of Thank you page messaging and show you a live example of how changing the Thank You page design significantly increased the user engagement for website.

Thank You Page Messaging

Thank You Page For Product Sales: This is already pretty well done by many e-commerce site but here’s just a refresher.

• Address the user by his name (you got it during the checkout process)
• Try to mention the product/ products ordered
• Give him the expected delivery time
• Give him your customer care number ( Yes! even if you have it up their on your header)
• Of course, you wont forget to show him other complementary products that can make his life so much better ( and fill your kitty)

Why do all these?

• Address him by name: establishes a connection, people feel good to be recognized, even on the Internet
• Repeat product name: giving him a last chance to check before you ship
• Delivery Time + Customer Care Number: Represent yourself as a responsible, committed company, gives your customer peace of mind.
• Complementary products:  What ? Don’t you want to sell more?

Thank You Page For Lead Forms: The essential elements that should be covered in your message includes:

• What is the next step: Is some one going to call / email him? When? Give an expected turn around time. (Respect your customer’s time, help them plan their work)
• Provide an alternate contact info for the prospect to reach you / your sales team (what if he needs an immediate quote and can’t wait for your sales guy to call back?)
• Depending on the industry you are, point him to some resource that further establishes your brand credibility (remember he just filled the lead form, you still need to sell)

Thank You Page for Whitepaper / E-book Download: So he is either researching the topic or trying to evaluate your knowledge/credibility in the domain. What do you give him ?

• Provide him with additional content on similar topic ( If he has downloaded your whitepaper on Google Adwords – show him your blog posts for 3 key Adwords competitor metrics that can improve your campaigns and 5 Adwords Mistakes that can you Bleed You Dry – He is very likely to click )
• Give him an option to subscribe (use this only if you publish regularly and can continue to provide useful content to him on regular basis)
• Ask for a tweet (if you are helping him with your whitepaper, he might feel gracious to share the word with a tweet – Free Publicity!)

Thank You Page Design Case Study

Ok, so enough of gyan ( theoretical knowledge) and now let me show you some real numbers from an experiment I did..
(A special thanks to my employer [x]cube LABS, for the permission to publish this screenshots and stats)

So now you know why your Thank You page could be as important as your landing page, give it a little more thought, make your Thank You work for you.

The post How to Optimize Your Thank You Page Design to Increase User Engagement appeared first on Adwords Consultant India : DigitalSRC.

SEO has evolved to great extent and now just getting good rankings for a website doesn’t finish a SEO consultant’s job. Client’s today are more ROI driven and if you really want your clients to convert the traffic that you deliver you will often need to help them with usability.

Though not really specific to increasing conversion, here are few usability tips that would help make your visitors spend a nice time on your website.

a) Users Don’t Like to Keep Guessing: Users love web pages that are self explanatory and don’t leave them guessing. We already have too many questions to answer in our life why would anyone like to visit a web page that just adds a few more questions to the list – what is this website about ? which link do I click next ? is that graphics clickable ? Yes, usability flaws basically means your users gets more questions for which they need to find the answers and keep guessing what next .
Provide your users with an intuitive navigation structure, help them move from one page to other in a logical way, provide them with visual clues and easily recognizable links that guides them to their goals – they should be happy with it.

b) Don’t Test Your User’s Patience: If you are offering a product or service to your visitors to test that’s great but it doesn’t allow you to test the patience of your users. The less action is required from users to test a service a random visitor is more likely to try it out. First time visitors would not be willing to fill in long forms or put in personal details. Give them a small form they might fill that to play with your product or service but give them a long form and they are likely not to visit your website again.

People often ask for email address while offering a test service, while I do understand that this is a good way to collect leads and a way to communicate with prospective customers, it would be much better and probably many more people would try the services if you don’t ask for the email address at the beginning. If you need to get the email address, may be you can ask users for a feedback at the end of their first use of your product or service and there you ask there emails.

c) Manage Your User’s Focus: Well we all know that user don’t read but they scan web pages however what we tend to neglect is during this scanning process user’s focus keep diverting. We should understand that human eyes typically move in a non linear fashion and this gives us the opportunity to arrest the user’s focus to any part of the web page and this can be used effectively to give users a better experience on your web page.

For example, bold texts, graphics, text in bigger fonts, videos or animations tends to get the users attention before the other page elements. If these elements can be used effectively to convey the necessary message and then provide hints on the way they should navigate through the pages to reach their goal it would definitely enhance the user experience as well as contribute to increasing the conversion rate.

d) Keep it Simple ( KIS ) – The Keep it Simple principle is just perfect when you are designing with your users in mind. Visitors typically don’t visit a website for the design, they come for information and keeping a simple design helps them to find the information they are looking for more easily. Look at Google, one of the most used website in the world, don’t you love the simplicity of their interface ? Present your information on the site clearly and give your visitors a few options for action without overcrowding them with unnecessary content.

e) Test, test and test some more – Testing is one of the key factors that improves your website’s usability. While it is good to get the site tested by a lot of people it might not be a viable option for new websites. But even conducting a test on a small audience is good. Test from the very beginning, organize the feedback , do changes based on them and test again. Testing is an iterative process and it is important to be organized with the process. Also bear in mind, don’t test your own application or website – you know exactly how it is built and how it is supposed to work so you would likely not see any issues with usability. Get it tested with people who are using the website for the first time and get their feedback.

Please feel free to add your own tips on improving usability in the comments section.

The post 5 Tips on Usability appeared first on Adwords Consultant India : DigitalSRC.

Quality Score as defined by Google, “Quality Score is the basis for measuring the quality and relevance of your ads and determining your minimum CPC bid for Google and the search network. This score is determined by your keyword’s click-through rate (CTR) on Google and the relevance of your ad text, keyword and landing page.”

A pretty clean and simple definition but why does Google use Quality Score to display and rank the paid ads and not just display the ads based on highest bids?

To answer this question we will need to understand Google’s objective. Google’s objective or for that matter, any search engine’s objective is to serve the most relevant results to its searchers. If the paid search results were displayed simply based on the highest bid values even unrelated websites with solid financial standing could easily out do the most relevant websites by placing a higher bid on targeted keywords. This would actually disappoint the search engines users, as they would often land up on that unrelated page while searching for their keyword and ultimately lowers the search engine’s credibility to its users. In simple words, Quality Score is an effective technique to ensure maximum relevance between the keywords and the ads displayed for that keyword and prevent unrelated results from appearing in the paid search results.

Now that we understand why Google factors in the Quality Score for their PPC listings, we also understand that to improve our paid search listings and lower the CPC it is important to have a good Quality Score. So now comes the big question, How to Improve your Quality Score.

Official – Factors affecting Quality Score

Google on its website declares the Adwords Quality Score formula as

Quality Score = (keyword’s CTR, ad text relevance, keyword relevance, landing page relevance)*

*Where the interactions between the Quality Score variables change as we continue to refine how to measure and define quality in AdWords.

Like all other things Google, this formula is also continuously refined to improve the relevance of ads and people across the search marketing industry today are busy analyzing the secrets of quality score and if there are any other untold factors or sub factors that can improve the factors affecting Quality Score.

UnOfficial – How To Improve Quality Score

The Click Through Rate for any keyword is affected by various factors including presence of keywords in the Ad Title, Ad Copy, in display URL. Proper call to actions in the ad copy can also affect the CTR to large extent.

Create Ad Groups: One of the most effective ways to implement these would be to divide all the keywords with smaller ad groups consisting of related keywords and then create a relevant ad copy for each group. This way it is easy to ensure that the ads displayed for each keyword contain the keyword.

Optimize Ad Copy: It is always better to have more than one ad copy for each of your ad groups. Use different call to actions and language to for each of these creatives. To get a proper feel of the performance of each of these ad copies, turn off the ad serving optimization and then serve these ads manually for equal amount of time and compare the results. This would help you to identify the best performing ad creative very easily. Once the best performing ad copy is selected, play around with it to improve the performance further. This should be a continuous process, because, there is no end to the extent to which you can optimize your ad creatives.

Match Types: Adwords offers various types of keyword matching options the default being broad match. It is important to test the various matching options to see which returns a better quality score. It has been observed that mostly “Exact match” returns a better score compared to Phrase match and broad match.

All the above-mentioned factors would improve the factors like keyword’s CTR, ad text relevance and keyword relevance and ultimately improves your Quality Score. Besides these there are a host of things that you can do on page to improve your landing page relevance and thus again add a boost to your Adwords Quality Score.

Use Keywords: Ensure that you use your keywords in the landing page content.

Title & Meta Tags: Use your best performing keywords in the title and Meta description for your landing page. Try to incorporate the text of your best performing ad into your Meta Description or body content.

SEO: Yes, a little bit of SEO and Link Building would also help to increase the relevance of the landing page for your targeted keywords in Google’s perspective. Improve the navigation and coding, add a few deep links using your keywords as anchor texts. These factors will not just make your landing page more relevant for your Adwords campaign but also would add value to your organic SEO campaign.

Check With Google: It is important to check if Google actually thinks your keywords are related to your landing page. Use the Site Related Keywords Tool to check the keywords related to your landing page and cross check with the keyword list for which you are using that landing page.

Important Site Pages: It might be a good option to add important site pages like, Privacy policy, Terms & Conditions, About Us etc. More than anything these pages would give the confidence in your visitors to do a transaction on your landing page and add to your conversion rate.

Multivariate Testing: This is the ultimate step in optimizing your landing page to improve your quality score. While the above mentioned factors would help to create and increase the landing page relevance multivariate testing helps you to compare variations of your landing page and see which one is giving the best output. Always create multiple variations of your landing page and test each option and their variation by changing the different page elements. Though there are innumerous factors that you can toy around with, some of the major factors that affect conversion are page heading, size of image on the page, call to actions, use of Verisign, BBB seals, readability, color scheme etc. Multivariate testing should be a continuous process and you should test various combinations of page elements to see which works best for your campaign.

Google Adwords has an inbuilt tool for multivariate testing, which makes it really easy to conduct such test, however, it is accessible only after you log in to your Adwords Account. You can view a overview of the Multivariate Testing Tool.

If all these factors are implemented properly the Quality Score is definitely going to improve and in turn would improve your Adwords ROI.A detailed look at the benefits attained through implementation of these factors can be listed as:

• Quality Score would Improve
• Reduction in Minimum CPC
• The CTR (Click Through Rate) would increase
• Increase in conversion Rate

There might be many other factors that contributes to improvement of your quality score, however, the factors mentioned above are the basic factors that goes into the quality score algo for most PPC providers. I would really appreciate if you would put your comments on this and any other factors that you think would help to improve Adwords Quality Score.

The post How to Improve Your Google Adwords Quality Score? appeared first on Adwords Consultant India : DigitalSRC.