How Much Would You Pay to Get Visitors to Leave Your Site?

Would you pay somebody to leave your site? No? Think again, because you may be doing it right now, and it's probably costing you more than you think.

How's that, you ask?

If you're paying for marketing that will drive traffic to your website but have not spent any time or money providing a better customer experience on your website, then you might as well be paying your visitors to leave.

Coming in for a bad landing

The other day I was analyzing a potential client's PPC campaign. They wanted us to review their ads and landing pages to see if we felt we could help them improve the campaign over their own efforts. What I found was pretty striking.

This potential client had been running dozens of ads for various video products they sold. The ads were good overall and each ad brought the user to a different landing page, which, for the most part, was very relevant to the search queries. But the problem I found was with the landing pages themselves. They were, to put it mildly, terrible.

So bad that I was surprised they were able to get any conversions at all. Lucky for them they were, but I know for a fact that the conversion rate was far less than what they could be. The net effect of this is that they were paying for visitors to come to their site and then leave, without every considering a purchase from them.

Drive conversions first, traffic later

Needless to say, we went back to the client to let them know that we could help them.

Significantly.

It wouldn't take much, really, just time to provide a better user experience on each of the product pages where the ads landed. While the whole site could use a pretty major overhaul, we could get immediate profit improvement just by fixing the landing pages first.

So before you go all out driving more traffic to your site, make sure that you're providing for a solid user experience. A better experience means more sales... without ever having to spend more on ads.