Boost Conversions by 880% (Cited from payperclicksearchengines.com)

Boost Conversions by 880% - A Case Study
By Michael Ullman | Published on 08/11/2008 | Bidding Strategies |
An easy way to dramatically boost conversions

Boost Conversion by 880"% - A Case Study

I recently launched a product in the "Gas Prices" niche. It's called The 2008 ULTIMATE Gas Saver Guide and it was originally meant to compete with the "water4gas" products as a legitimate "high gas prices" solution.

As I do whenever I launch a new product, the first thing I did was set up a PPC campaign in order to test and improve the sales page. I simply drive traffic and continually tweak the sales page until my rate of improvement starts to slow down. Once I have my sales page reasonably optimized, I boost my ad spend, narrow and refine my keyword lists and adgroups, and move forward.

This one was a little different. Because of all the affiliates promoting "water4gas" products (the original "water4gas" became one of the best selling products ever for ClickBank, reaching an unheard-of Gravity of nearly 1000!), the cost for keywords and decent ad position in this niche ran quite high (this was before Google clamped down on these somewhat scammy products).

Because of the nature of the product, and all the competing products, I found conversions were extremely low. The "water4gas" craze had peaked, people were skeptical, and this resulted in way too many "tire-kickers" - expensive, low converting kicks.

Well, there weren't a whole lot of negative keywords to use for this niche. Affiliates had played out the usual "buy" keywords and even long-tail keywords were converting poorly.

In other words, this was a fairly typical scenario: a competitive niche with expensive traffic, most of it very poorly converting. I had already optimized the sales page to the point where any future improvements would be very small.

What to do?

I decided this was the perfect scenario for the ultimate conversion-booster. I added the price to the headline of the ad!

Instantly my CTR (Click-Through Rate) dropped like a stone. It went from a high of 12.5% to under 1%.

BUT....

Conversions, which had been hovering around 0.5% jumped to almost 4.5% - an 880"% improvement!

The reason is simple but instructive. A headline that said "Double Your Mileage" got a lot of low-quality clicks. By "low-quality clicks" I mean "non-converting clicks". It attracted a lot of information-seekers, freebie-seekers and the just plain curious. They weren't looking to spend money.

But a headline that says "Double Your Mileage - $47" is of little interest to those same people. This headline tells you right upfront: this is gonna cost you. No freebies here. It's a "self-qualifying" headline. If you have no intention of spending any money you aren't clicking. And if you do click, you do so already knowing that the solution this ad is offering is going to cost you.

(It's worth nothing that I initially had a very high CTR so that when it dropped it didn't impact my Quality Score, hence my cost per click, too badly.)

You can use price as a qualifier on nearly any product pitch ad. Yes, you will potentially lose some sales. But your conversion rate and overall ROI will be much, much higher.