Beyond your keywords, ad text, and your landing page, the engine that drives your PPC campaign is your contact form (if you’re generating leads). If your contact form isn’t geared toward your core audience, and if it’s not requesting the appropriate amount of information, then you’re shooting yourself (and your PPC campaign) in the foot.

Most users guard their personal information as if it were made of gold (as well they should). Yes, your landing page copy and design needs to create a sense of trust, urgency, as well as provide plenty of reasons to request additional information – but if your contact form is too long, or too short, users may shy away and not take the desired action.

The one thing that can keep users from filling out your contact form is the actual form itself. This may sound crazy but it’s true. Ask yourself this: what is the minimum amount of information I need to gather from a lead in order to follow up with them properly? Can you follow up with a prospect with simply their name and email address? I would say that most of you answered this last question “no” and that’s fine. However, you need to ask for the appropriate amount of information from your leads (not too much, not too little).

Review your contact form and really give some thought as to the information that is mission critical for sales. For example, recently a client made the phone number a required field on their contact form. The bad news: conversion rates dropped slightly because I believe at this stage of the buying process, some users are not ready to provide their phone number. However, the good news is revenue and ROI are up because if my client can get a lead on the phone, they have a much higher chance of closing the sale. And, those individuals who won’t provide their phone number may not be the highest quality leads (they’re just shopping around). Don’t be afraid to make changes!

With this being said: proceed with caution! Believe it or not, your contact form is much like an antique vase; it is extremely fragile and needs to be handled with care. Small changes can have big effects, both positive and negative. Whenever you make a change, monitor your performance/results like a hawk – and act accordingly.

In summary, take a step back, and do the following:

• Think about when a user hits your site, where they are in the buying process. What are information are they willing to provide at this time, and what information do you need to take the next step.
• Craft your contact form so that it asks for the right information, and right amount of information.
• Make changes to this affect, but monitor them closely and act accordingly.

These steps will help you increase your conversion rate and enhance your ROI.

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This entry was posted on Friday, May 16th, 2008 at 9:03 am and is filed under Advanced PPC Strategies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.