Google AdWords™ for Dummies®, 2nd Edition

Chapter 12. Building a "Climb the Ladder" Web Site

In This Chapter

• Understanding the goals of your Web site

• Discovering Web site tools that turn visitors into buyers

• Using multimedia to get closer to your customers

• Turning your business into a testimonial farm

• Using PHP to personalize your site for returning customers

Your business is just a system for turning complete strangers into great customers. AdWords finds you the strangers, your ad invites them in, and your landing page opt-in and e-mail give you the ability to keep the conversation going. Your Web site contains the content that will turn leads into buyers, buyers into repeat customers, and customers into referral sources and advocates.

One way to look at your Web site is purely numerically: traffic in, money out. In a nutshell, the game of online marketing can be reduced to that equation. Your Web site, in this view, is a tool for extracting cash from visitors. You set up conversion tracking and analytics and reports to find out how good your Web site is at extracting a purchase from which visitors (see Chapters 14 and 15). You run split tests to increase the amount of money you get per visitor (see Chapter 13). But when you actually design and build your Web site, sales and money should be the farthest thing from your mind. Instead, you focus on growing customers.

The big goal of your Web site is to develop the relationship between you and your customers. Sales are part of that relationship, and an important part — after all, ...