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If You Are Doing Any Type of PPC, You Need To Do This

I hear it all the time. “I’m getting traffic but I don’t see any sales.” So you spend more money on your Pay Per Click (PPC) campaign and it has little or no effect. There can be several reasons but let’s assume for a moment that your campaign is set up properly. Let’s talk about what happens to your traffic once they get to your site? A quick look at your analytics reveals that your bounce rate is over 80 percent. A bounce is a visit where there is no interaction on the page. What’s going on? It’s hard to determine that from the analytics. You need to see interactions with the page or why there is a lack of them.

Mouse Tracking

I have found a valuable tool in mouse tracking. This type of analysis goes beyond the visit and records where a visitor clicks, how they move their mouse on the page and how far down they scroll. This provides in depth information on HOW the visitor interacts with the page not just that the visited the page.

How does it work? When a visitor interacts with the page the software records a click. The more clicks, the more red the area clicks. See example below:

What is important to understand is that this is just one dimension of interaction. The other interaction that is important is how far down the page a visitor scrolls. This is particularly important on the mobile version of the site because everything is in a single column.

I find in many cases that the visitor barely scrolls past what they can see on their mobile device when the page loads. Because of this careful attention needs to be paid to how the page looks and if the call to action leads the visitor down the page. If your landing page is three quarters logo and navigation and the top of some headline, there’s a good chance that the visitor isn’t scrolling down the page. How would you know this for sure? Install page scroll tracking software.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, how many words is a video worth? Another tool I will use is mouse tracking videos. These videos show how the visitor moves the mouse and the page when they visit. You can see if there is an effort to read the page or if it is the casual scroll to the bottom and back to the top. It will show you in real time how fast they scroll, where they click and how long they were on the page. Pretty cool, right?

Pulling it all together

The combination of these three tracking tools coupled with statistical analytics can give you a clearer picture of HOW your site is being used not just if visitors are coming. This type of analytics can turn landing pages from duds to converters. I know as I have seen it in my own experience with these tools.

If you are going to make the investment in PPC, wouldn’t it make sense to see if your investment is working properly. These tools are easy to implement and fascinating to review but you really need to look at them objectively. A line I put in all my proposals for this type of work is “I don’t claim to be able to predict human behavior.” The reason is that sometimes the results are not what you expect and you need to learn from that and make changes accordingly. That is the purpose of the tools, to convert more of your traffic to sales.