No form on PPC landing page
-
My client has explained to me that they want to drive sales CALLS instead of form submissions because they feel they have a better chance of "closing the deal" on the phone. So my company is working to design a PPC landing page that focuses on the phone number. But the question is, do you still think we should include a simple form on the landing page? There are two competing trains of thought in my office. One is concerned that if we offer a form, people won't call. The other is that if we DON'T offer a form, we will lose out on possibly good customers.
In addition to the form, no form question is the question of providing additional links to other parts of the website. One person I work with is concerned visitors will leak away and not pick up the phone. My concern is that if we do not offer a way to "learn more" the visitor will become agitated and not call at all.
This is specifically for a focused PPC effort. To recap:
1- Form or no form?
2- Links or no links? -
- The community is convinced they can sell anyone on the community if they talk to them.
Sorry for the confusion. What I meant by that statement was that the community believes that if they can talk to someone on the phone, they can get them to come to the community for a visit.
Luckily for my client, their facility is top notch and they have a very solid reputation. They are booked on some floors but have openings for people with more serious issues and they are always actively looking for new residents. In this particular industry, you are constantly "losing" customers.
I must say that just because the facility is great does not mean potential customer visits shouldn't be met by someone trying to extol the virtues of the facility. I think the word "salesperson" is throwing us all off here. It is a very soft sell on their part because the community understands that location, smell, cleanliness and quality of food are huge. And they are not worried about that.
All they want to do is talk to someone on the phone and schedule a visit, the rest will take care of itself.
-
- The community is convinced they can sell anyone on the community if they talk to them
They will NOT close one single sale by phone.
Unfortunately, I visit these places frequently and have done that for years. The selling points really are.... Location (how far family has to drive to visit), price (can vary by thousands of dollars per month), quality of facilities and food, attention of staff to the daily needs of residents (rapid assessment is a quick check of toenails trimmed and teeth brushed), and does the place smell like pee (two steps into the building can clear your brain of the finest salesmanship).
If they want to close the deal they got to get the people into their facility and impress them. The people who make the decisions about this purchase fall into two groups...
-
urgent buyers - these folks are really busy, really stressed, and often working on immediate deadlines because their family member is being discharged from a hospital or has lost a caregiver.
-
savvy consumers - their parent is already in one of these facilities and they are looking for something better. They will not be fooled by BS on the phone. They know the deficits of their parents' current living arrangement and are trying to make an important improvement.
The reputation of these facilities is often widely known. If you have a great facility there will be a long waiting list to get in. Salesmanship will not be needed. When salesmanship is needed the buyer will believe what he sees rather than what he is told.
-
Thank you all so much for your thoughtful answers. So a little info that might help the discussion.
- This is for an assisted living community where residents a large monthly bill
- it is normally the son or daughter who calls to discuss the service.
- The phones will be manned by industry professional, not salespeople. Although they are instructed to put on a very soft sell, the initial call is not a true sales call. It is more for the caller looking to learn more by speaking with the community liaison.
- The community is convinced they can sell anyone on the community if they talk to them.
- They will be available 24/7.
Again, I appreciate all the feedback and will update this post after our campaigns run and tests are over to see what worked and what didn't. Hmmm, could this have the makings of my first YouMoz post? Stay tuned....
-
I agree with EGOL you must A/B test plus use
analytics something like kiss metrics or mix panel in your forms so you can figure out who is actually filling them out. I think it is way too hard to determine without knowing what you're selling. I have a client that sells a very expensive product that is very unique, and almost everything has to be determined verbally. However, I would never dream of not allowing someone to use a form.
You want to track the leads A/B test, and you can do that using one of the analytics programs above for terminating who is filling out what form.
Call rail and many other similar call metrics tools are available to tell you if the best way is to use the telephone or to use a form Or combination of the two.
You will have to then confirm with your client which one is converting is it just getting a lead or is there more value in a phone Lead?
could you not just ask the person for their phone number in the form? Then your client can call them back. I don't really know enough about what you're trying to do to give you a better answer I'm sorry.
All the best,
Thomas
-
One could argue that someone that took the time to fill out a form may be more committed than say, someone that picked up the phone and asked a question. If they haven't done any real lead scoring, they don't really know which converts better.
I would rather call on 10 form submissions and close four than field 20 calls and close four. If that's the situation, find someone you like on the sales team and hand them forms. The rest may come around if such is the case.
And yes, it's generally a great idea to let a prospect self-qualify. Give them as much information as they need to call and not much more. Would your client rather have their sales team spend a ton of time dealing with non-buyers, or someone that feels informed enough to make contact?
-
A landing page without the form is very much dependent upon the industry you are working with. In my experience deals that contain big dollars convert better on the phone.
I know form can provide you phone numbers as well but when person check the website their enthusiasm is different which might or might not be after some time (hours of days) when you call them back! My opinion would be to take a look at the industry and see if this is a website where phone is better than a form.
I guess link should be provided as this allow user to better understand the company and product/service you are trying to sell but obviously your call to action should be powerful and eye catchy (use eye tracking here) that users stick to it and call.
Hope this helps!
-
Eric -
EGOL definitely has some good insights on the matter. All I would add from my experience in PPC and dealing with these types of scenarios is two things. First, as EGOL said, I would encourage you to A/B test this thing substantially and see which PPC ads that convert on the phone vs. form page actually result in sales. I am assuming they have some kind of CRM you can pass that information on to from lead source all the way to closing sale. You may find the conversion rate and CPA are equal in the end, or lower for phone vs. form, but the resulting sales are higher and thus a better ROI in the end for your clients ad spend.
Second, concerning the links, I've generally found that a site with quality product content, and lots of it in a variety that fits your targeted market, generally converts better than a bare bones lander that only features one or two products. Obviously this is going to differ on your product, industry, consumer demographic, etc... But in most cases I've seen higher conversion rates where people had more to choose from. The logic being somewhat along the lines of they come to the site off your PPC ad thinking it's what they want, they see the product is not exactly what they want, but then they can browse around and find something similar you offer that is what they want, and you then have a lead you may otherwise have lost.
For whatever that's worth, hope it may be of some use to you in your decision making process!
-
I see.
I think that there are a lot of different types of people out there.
There are a lot of questions..... Will the client have a skilled closer at the phone 24/7? If not, they will probably miss clients in different time zones and who look for information at different times per day.
I would be disappointed if the phone didn't answer or if I got an untrained person... then I would be adding their phone number to tomorrow's "to do list"... no, I wouldn't do that, I would call their competitor.... no, I would not do that either because I would want to read, study and compare before I get an obnoxious deal closer on the phone.
So, a better route might be to serve the phone number while the deal closer is on duty and have a form to collect data when his is not on duty or on another phone line or in the crapper. The deal closer could have a control panel where he pushes a button and the page gets changed from a phone pitch to a form.
-
Thank you EGOL. The hope is that the landing page will do a good enough job explaining the services provided that they will want to pick up the phone and call. We currently get a lot of form submissions that do not lead to sales so, essentially, this phone-centric landing page is actually a test. Can we close more people when we only give them a phone number and no other way to contact us?
Also, we are using this landing page for one specific product we sell, not for the entire campaign. So we will be able to see how it compares to other search terms that are being sent to specific areas of the site that speak to the search term.
I guess my question was born out of me being nervous that if we ONLY provide a phone, we will
a) piss people off
b) lose leadsMaybe the test is. we build two landing pages - one that does have a form and one that doesn't and see what happens.
-
Honestly..... You don't want people who have no idea who your customers are, who your client is or what you are selling to be guessin' and kibitzin' about this.
You need to test this and see which one makes the most money. If you don't test a bunch of different options then there is almost a certainty that you will leave a lot of money on the table month after month after month.
I'd be working on a bunch of options to test and a method of collecting good data.
How long have you guys been arguing about this? The website visitors are the ONLY people with the answer.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
PPC & Google analytics - super advanced online course ?
Hi guys, I'm looking for online course for PPC & Google analytics... I'm not looking something for starter and im not looking for something
Conversion Rate Optimization | | EdmondHong87
that you can find on YouTube...I'm talking about super advanced...The best of the best! Anyone know something like this ? Thx1 -
Too many pages or not enough?
I have an SEO question for you: My client is building a new website and wondered about individual pages for his items, let me break it down for you... He sells display cabinets, one of which is a shot glass cabinet. He has 5 types of the shot glass cabinets, that come in 3 different types of wood, 2 different mirrored backings, and with or without a locking mechanism... Now is it better, SEO-wise, to create 5 pages for his shot glasses, with the selectable options, or is it better to create a different page for each of his shot glass cabinet options? This would mean something like 24 different shot glass pages. He feels that the more pages he has, the more lines he's throwing out there looking for a bite, but he, and I, don't know if that is necessarily a good thing for SEO. The pages would be named slightly differently, but the copy on each page would read just about the same... What do you think? 5 pages with options, or 24 pages again with the ability to change the options. Side Question: If more pages is the way to go, what would be the draw back when he does this with his other 8 cabinet types and their multitude of configurations? Thanks for the help!
Conversion Rate Optimization | | robertsteck0 -
Should I link from an optimised product image to the product page from a blog post?
If I am writing a blog post about a product, or a number of products, and I'm including optimised images of the product, should I link from the images to the product page in the shop? Usually I remove links from images as they lead visitors to a simple image page but could it be worth linking from an optimised image to a product? Thanks in advance.
Conversion Rate Optimization | | the_wildman0 -
Help Me Improve this Page, Please
Time for the weekly "help me improve this page" post 🙂 I'd appreciate it if you all would take a look at this page and give me some tips to improve it from a user - point - of - view. The URL is http://goo.gl/9mcyF My main goal is conversions and I'm trying to make this page as good and helpful and easy as possible for potential buyers and visitors. I'd appreciate any tips or suggestions that you think may help. Thanks!
Conversion Rate Optimization | | Prime851 -
Anyone have problems with over reporting from PPC?
Hi All, Hoping somebody can help me out with this...I am getting a lot of slack from my boss over this. So we use Marketo for landing page creation. I create unique landing pages for PPC so that people who come in via ppc are the only people that see these landing pages. I put the google adwords conversion code on the thank you pages of these pages. So User sees PPC add > clicks add and gets sent to a registration page > fills out reg page and gets sent to thank you page that contains conversion code. When I look in adwords, I am seeing that for this specific campaign that I had 15 conversions yesterday...in marketo I am seeing 0 conversions. I do not know which one to believe. Anyone have any ideas? Pat
Conversion Rate Optimization | | PatBausemer0 -
Shorter checkout form converts better? Or can it be harmful?
I've frequently read that the shorter the checkout form the better. My checkout form has the following fields: First name Last name Email Username Password Retype password Card number Card expiration date CVV code Billing street Billing city Billing state Billing zip Here's the thing. Since it's a web-app, I don't need the "billing address" as I'm not physically shipping them anything. Should I remove it? The no-brainer answer seems to be "yes", but I'm wondering if folks don't see any billing address fields, it may look suspicious. Conversions for having it and not don't seem to make much difference, so I suppose I'm looking for some tie-breaker opinions. The "password" and "retype password" fields could be eliminated by emailing the user's a system-generated password. But once again, could a user see this as odd or suspicious and then abandon? Even if I tell them I'll be emailing them a password? They could be sensitive thinking we'd email the wrong email address due to system error or their own typo. I could also eliminate the CVV and not validate against that. But once again, could a user seeing the CVV gone become wary? As much as I'd like to have "guest checkout' it's not feasible. The app is tied to a logged in account, which would also make eliminating the "username" impossible. Based on all the above, I could trim down the form considerably, but would I be doing more harm than good? I could A/B test it, but I don't believe I have a sufficient number of users to test against. Everything I buy, physical or online app, has an address field, so perhaps folks are accustomed to filling out this stuff and I should just keep it to align with user expectations? Thanks.
Conversion Rate Optimization | | bluekite770 -
Rel="author" On Normal Pages
Hello, I know you can add rel="author" to blog posts but has anyone tried adding them to normal pages? Does it work? Does it improve CTR? Thanks, Scott
Conversion Rate Optimization | | ScottBaxterWW0 -
Lookiing for examples of local "small biz" sites with phone or contact form conversion points
Hi Guys, I'm looking for any good examples of small business sites that you've come across that do a good job at converting potential visitors to clients. I'm primarily thinking about service oriented business such as Doctors, Dentists, Salons, Clothing stores, small restuarants, car detailing services, local photographers, etc. I'm just trying to digest other examples and look for new inspirations.
Conversion Rate Optimization | | DotCar0