14 replies to this topic

[HelpSeoBeginner]

Hi Everyone,

We recently started our PPC campaign and since we are a Business to Business company, our aim is to get other businesses to visit our website and eventually register thus we have a lead.

At first when we started we were getting 2-3 registrations per day which my boss was happy with when you compare it to how much we were spending.

But now, people still click on our website but they dont seem to want to register.....

Is this normal behaviour? Can somebody please shed some light?

Thanks

[Mikl]

It must surely depend on what the website is offering. Are you offering a benefit that would make the visitor want to register? Are the benefits clearly explained to visitor? Is the privacy policy likely to be acceptable to most visitors?

There are many sites where you are obliged to register just to get the most basic information about what the site is offering. Personally, I would avoid registering with such sites. Other people might too.

Mike

[HelpSeoBeginner]

On the registration page, there are benefits mentioned.....

People who visit our website are able to view all the information in terms of the products, the product information etc.... but since we only sell to other businesses not to the general public...... We hide the prices and any offers that we have going on...... which requires people to login to view that information.

Once they register, we run a check to see if they are a real business within our industry thus the general public would not get very far.

Also, with regards to privacy policy..... we do not give out their information to any 3rd parties.

[Michael Martinez]

Have you changed anything?

[HelpSeoBeginner]

Have you changed anything?

No.

Nothing was changed.......the registrations are very sporadic.

Last week, however, on our registration page, I decided to highlight the benefits of registering more to see if that has any impact on registration.

We have a financial incentive and I talked to my boss with regards to increasing that to see if it has any impact but he believes that if someone is going to register, they will register regardless.

[rolf]

I don't have a registration based site, but I run a couple of mail order sites and sporadic seems to be the way it goes, for these sites at least. Sometimes we've got more orders than we can comfortably handle and I end up working very long days just to get the orders out of the door, other times it can be comparatively quiet, and whilst we have a generally upward trend I haven't been able to smooth out the peaks and troughs as yet.

The answers you need are in the data, so first you need a good statistics package - I can't recommend anything more highly than Google Analytics. It's free and comprehensive enough to keep most people happy for quite some time. I'm assured there are more powerful stats programs for those who get really involved in this sort of thing, but I haven't used them as GA does everything I need and then some with aplomb.

GA also has some great tools for empirically testing either a/b changes or multivariate combinations of elements, so once you have a hypothesis you can test it before rolling it out site-wide.

[Michael Martinez]

No.

Nothing was changed.......the registrations are very sporadic.

Last week, however, on our registration page, I decided to highlight the benefits of registering more to see if that has any impact on registration.

So you DID change something.

So, I suggest you think of what else you changed that you don't think was a change. People can only guess at what might be your issue but assuming that anything is too insignificant to share with us only makes the guesswork more wild and unreliable.

[HelpSeoBeginner]

So you DID change something.

So, I suggest you think of what else you changed that you don't think was a change. People can only guess at what might be your issue but assuming that anything is too insignificant to share with us only makes the guesswork more wild and unreliable.

The PPC campaign has been going on for some time now and throughout the this time, the registrations have been very sporadic.

Last week I thought maybe if I highlight the benefits of registering a bit more, this may result in a more steady and consistent registrations.

I decided to increase our bid for certain words.

Note: The campaign had and still remains unchanged for large periods thus it still means the registrations have been sporadic.

[scouseflip]

One thing have I almost always found is that increasing the bid (and thus, hopefully, the position in the sponsored listings) results in a lower conversion rate - don't know if this is the same for others but it's certainly a fact for us. Our hunch is that by being in the top 1-3 results you pick up more lazy clicks - where we are halfway down the page the conversion is better as people have invested a bit more time in looking at the results and have sought your link out before clicking, like a natural vetting process. but of course you lose a heck of a lot of volume by being in those positions rather than top of the page.

Perhaps (and this is just a shot in the dark) by increasing your bid you are getting better positions and so more clicks, but those clicks are of a lesser quality than you were getting previously? Hence you may be spending your budget quickly through buying the volume, where before you were getting through the budget more slowly, but were having better conversions because the clicks were better quality?

But also, what sort of time period are you seeing the decline over? If you're looking for 2-3 conversions a day, it's always going to be sporadic on low volumes so you would need to track it over long periods to build up enough data to start analysing for trends reliably.

[HelpSeoBeginner]

General Question to Everyone:

If you are trying to get people to register to your website, would you say having your registration page as the landing page better or the product category they searched for?

For example, if your are an electronics website and a customer searches for monitors; would your monitors page be better or your registration bearing in mind they have to register to view the prices and to purchase?

[Michael Martinez]

You have to do some A/B testing for these kinds of things. Try it one way for a while then try it the other way.

I, personally, click away from sites that ask or require me to register before seeing their content but maybe I'm the rare exception to the rule. You need to collect a lot of data before making a decision like that.

[chrishirst]

but maybe I'm the rare exception to the rule.

Well that'll be two exceptions already.

I won't register on a site just to browse their products unless I am 99.9% sure they have what I want, and if I click through a specific result, I want to be on that specific page, not dumped on a page that makes me search again to see a product specification or what colours it comes in.

[Catz]

I, personally, click away from sites that ask or require me to register before seeing their content but maybe I'm the rare exception to the rule.

Add another to the bunch!

I leave a site asking me for registration info almost as soon as it pops up, preventing me from seeing what I came for.

Many times when salespeople have input on a site design, they try to put their pushy salesman tactics into the web site design, which is a real turn off. We don't like it in person, and we won't put up with it online.

There are plenty of other businesses/websites out there to choose from, and a site asking for registration info before proving their value is just asking to lose potential customers.

You can clearly state on your site that you only sell to other businesses and not the general public without hiding your prices or requiring registration.

By requiring registration to see the prices, you are just turning people off to your site before they even have a chance to see what you have to offer.

[cfreek]

+1
And I think most people seem to dislike required registrations. Thus sites like bugmenot (dot) com.

[piskie]

I find compulsory registrations are a really big deterrent normally resulting in me taking a quick look and moving on.

The site has to extremely desirable for me to even consider registering.
So I would consider the possibility that you have already scooped up most of the visitors that have considered this site desirable enough to register. That could leave current visitors in the category who think that although the site looks useful, not useful enough for me to register and risk my Email Address being in the hands of yet another marketing minded nuisance.