What is the purpose of advertising?
Advertising legend David Ogilvy says that advertising is a "medium for information, a message for a single purpose: to sell." We want those who hear or see our marketing messages to do something. We want them to take action and ultimately buy and use Accu-Chek products, right?
We cannot ignore this goal when it comes to digital advertising. We need to ask ourselves: What action do we want them to take after they click on our ad? What do we want them to do when they land on our website? When we know this goal or goals, then we can design ads and landing pages that are optimized for those goals.
What do you want them to do?
Converting the customers eyes on the page into actions that help our business are called just that; "conversions." Conversions can come in various forms. For example, if the goal is generating leads for sales calls, then we may want them to give us their contact information in a form. If the goal is brand awareness, then we might ask them to watch a video or download a coupon for a free sample. The key is getting the customer to take an action to pushes the relationship farther into the marketing funnel or increases their engagement / purchase intent.
How do I tell them what I want them to do?
The worst thing we can do for a customer is leave them hanging. When the customer lands on our site, we should answer the question... Now What? A clear and obvious call-to-action is essential here. Help the customer along just as you would if they were in front of you and give them many paths to your desired action.
Another example - Simply placing the same conversion button (like get your free meter coupon) in multiple places around the site can have huge returns. This is the power of utilizing an entire website to drive customer action, not just landing pages of a paid campaign. If they navigate away from that one page, they could get lost or lose interest. We want to give them every opportunity possible to engage with us and complete the action.
How do I know if things are working?
There are tracking options and metrics that we can use to know when the action is taken and how it is performing. We can tag things in the site so when the customer completes the form, makes a purchase, registers for a club, downloads something, views the video, likes something, etc. then the action is tallied. We can measure the number of conversions we get (Conversion Rates).
Conversion rate plays an important part in understanding site usability, visitor satisfaction and experience.