Will This Improve My Adwords Conversion Rate?

I’m not a heavy user of PPC, but I do run a few campaigns.  PPC advertising is becoming ever more expensive so I spend a lot of time now optimizing my campaigns to improve my conversion rate.

Here’s something I tried a few days ago.  I haven’t been running this long enough to be able to give you any specific results yet, but I’ll let you know when I can.

By using the <a name> attribute I’m now directing ad groups, and even specific keywords, to the exact spot on my landing page that I want the clickers to see.  Here’s what I’m doing:

I have an ad group focused on tours of New York City.  Within that ad group I have some keywords that include the word ‘from’ (as in ‘Tours from New York City’) and some that include the word ‘to’ as in ‘Tours to New York City’.

The landing page I’m directing this ad group to is a page with a selection of tours to North Eastern US cities, including New York – i.e. NYC, Boston, Philadelphia, etc.

So the keywords that include the word ‘from’ are directed to the landing page as you’d expect.  There they will find a selection of tours of cities in the Eastern US, with departure points from New York.

But the keywords that include the words ‘to’ or ‘of’ are directed specifically to the paragraph on tours of New York City, which is one of the paragraphs on the page.

To do this I’m using the <a name>anchor text</a> tag.

Here’s how I set it up:

I select the paragraph that I want my visitors to see.  Let’s call it ‘Tours of New York City’.

I need to give it a name that the <a name> tag can use – let’s call it ‘newyork’.  (Remember there cannot be any spaces in a url).

I then enclose that paragraph in the <a name> tags like this:

<a name=”newyork”>Tours of New York City</a>

In order to access that paragraph directly from a click through I then need to define the destination url like this:

http://www.mytravelsite.com/landingpage.html#newyork

The ‘#’ character following the .html tells the browser to look for the <a name> tag that’s called ‘newyork’, and visitors who click through to my site using that specific keyword will go straight to the paragraph that deals specifically with tours of New York City.

By doing this, and eliminating the need for them to look for NYC tours on a page containing tours to a range of Eastern US cities, I’m hoping to improve my conversion rate.

And, by the way, it doesn’t remove the opportunity I have of getting them to take a tour to another city if they prefer.

I’ll let you know what happens when I have enough data to come to a reliable conclusion!

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Tagged as: improve conversion rate, ppc