It’s time to move the needle and get more sales. Your marketing team, copywriter, web designer and creative director have all been working together like a well-oiled machine. Your keywords have all been carefully targeted. Your text ads have all been written and your keyword bids have been placed. Your landing page has been designed, after several rounds of creative changes with powerful persuasive design and copy that has been finely tuned. You’re online marketing campaign is polished and ready to go.
So who’s job is it to convert?
Internally it’s everyone’s job to convert your prospect into a customer, which is why it’s important for your team to work together, which can sometimes be difficult if not impossible. If your team is not working well together with a common goal and strategy your conversion will suffer for it. But let’s assume you’ve got a well-oiled marketing machine inside your company. Everyone is on the same page and are working towards maximizing conversions using continuous improvements, persuasive web design and rigorous testing to get the biggest possible impact.
Oh yeah, let’s say we’ve also got the “what” and “how” part covered. We know what to test and how to conduct a proper statistically valid test and not just rely on the testing tools to tell us the confidence level has reached a point we’re happy with. Let’s also assume our testing methodology is all squared away and we’re ready for some serious gains and insight.
Then someone asks the question.
What part of the marketing campaign is responsible for our conversion?
At first it seems like a simple but silly question, so much that it almost gets ignored. But it’s not such a silly question because the measurement of success depends on the answer to this simple question. What part of the marketing campaign? Why all of it of course. Right?
Well, No. Not really.
Is it the job of the adWords text ad to convert your prospect? Or is it the job of the landing page? Or is it both?
Your adWords ad has been written with conversion in mind yes, and is targeted to the proper audience and works together with your carefully designed landing page. But if the web visitor does not convert to a sale is it really the fault of the adWords ad?
No, it’s not.
The adWords ad has only one job. To get the prospect to click. That’s it. It’s entire purpose is click through and that is how we should measure the success or failure of our adWords. If a prospect clicks, we have no right to ask any more of that humble 70 character text ad or any other traffic driving campaigns, including banner ads. There are simply too many factors that go into conversion to be managed in 70 characters or 768 by 90 pixels. The psychology of online sales is complex and therefore we need more space than that to mitigate things like friction and anxiety and align motivation and support. No traffic driving campaign no matter how well written or designed can support the full weight and responsibility of conversion. The job of conversion lies on the shoulders of your landing page.
