Sorry about the long delay in posts. I have been working on two HUGE projects that required a LOT of my time. I will be back posting quite a bit more and have a lot of great info for everyone the next coming months!
Anyways……Not to long ago, I noticed Gauher Chaudhry started having a regular spot in CX Digital’s weekly newsletter. After reading the first couple tips I noticed that everything he was writing was PRETTTTY geared towards beginners. Which, of course, makes sense. Nobody that advanced is going to be reading these types of emails really since they already get flooded with offers they should be running and expiration notices and the 10 million other emails you get a day. Beginners WOULD be scouring through this info trying to pickup any tips they can get their hands on.
However, today I checked out the tip of the week:
TIP OF THE WEEK
By Gauher Chaudhry (Author, Pay Per Click Formula)
Statistics indicate that capitalizing the first letter in each word of a domain results in better conversions. This is because the user can better read the display URL that may encourage better click-thru rates. For example, the display URL"www.FreeRingtones.com" will generally result in a higher click-thru rate than simply using "www.freeringtones.com."
After reading this, I thought I’d quick critique this tip.
First of all, I have looked and never actually found any study done on this so I would love to see which statistics Gauher is talking about. Gauher, if you see this, comment and let me know. I’m not calling you out, simply would like to look at this data.
Second of all, this tip works great for any of the results on the RIGHT hand side of the page.
HOWEVER, for the top spots which show up above the natural results, I show a much better CTR with no drop in conversions by using ALL lowercase JUST like how it would be displayed if it was in natural search results.
So instead of using www.FreeRingtones.com like Gauher suggests, I would test www.freeringtones.com, freeringtones.com, www.freeringtones.com/ Destination url’s that are ALL lowercase.
One of the larger impacts I found on increasing your ctr is the destination url, so I usually split test a few different destination url’s right off the bat.
Something else I have found to work pretty good at times (but not always) is to use a call to action in your actual url. For instance buying the domain clickherenow.com, and using subdirs off that clickherenow.com/for/ringtones
You can also switch that up a bit and try freeringtones.com/clickhere/fordeals …I’m sure you get the point. It really comes down to split testing. If your not testing everything that can be tested, than your not really doing your job.
If you have any questions or any other pointers leave a comment!
Your saving me time…
Thanks for the heads up. I sometimes take the advice of gurus blindly without testing their assumptions.
I also think KISS is important. So, I’m going to provide a link to all of Gauher’s landing pages so you can see firsthand what he’s REALLY up to these days. http://www.internetisseriousbusiness.com – note it’s in lower case 🙂
T – you’re 100% on point. above organic it’s all about trust. IME, on the right it’s all about remarkability… and trust because searchers are getting more used to the concept that these are paid results. If many of my competitors are doing one thing, I like to go in stark contrast providing it does justice to our customers. Gauher’s tips are fine but marketing requires so much context to any situation. It’s almost impossible to apply broad rules unless it’s something like “hey, make sure you didn’t set your budget to $50 a day”.