Question : Conversions fall when moved away from homepage

Hi, Just want to clear something up.,...when running my adwords campaign, the URL used in as the destination URL is the homepage.

No I know that is wrong, but when I use the specific URL of the products we are selling, we don't have single product pages but one page for each group of related/same/slightly different in size products, the sales drop like a stone, the CTR remains the same though!!!

The conversions are just not there.

I think the homepage is our best looking page, and possibly inspries confidence...

Could it be that the product pages which are just lists...well not quite but a picture of the product, a description, the price, then the price and a box to select quantity...

The depth of the page is quite considerable, some pages upto 30 products deep!!

No I know the short answer is possibly yes it does stop conversions, but I am looking for some constructive ideas, of the best step forward, change the way the products are displayed...stick with the homepage URL at the moment to earn money to pay for the product pages to be upgraded?

That sort of thing!!!  Any ideas really :)

Answer : Conversions fall when moved away from homepage

This is really hard because it is like making a guess based on only having 10% of the equation

First of all you are saying your conversions drop... is that for every single keyword? You are tracking at a keyword level right?

Generally the more specific the keyword, the more specific you should have a landing page

You should only be testing with 20% of your ads... thus you would have A A A A B - if you are switching things around wholesale, you have no data to really work with - even external factors like the world cup can make a difference with sales.

Play with keywords you know convert first because they give you possibly the biggest volume and you can work to improve. Create multiple versions of a landing page for your top converting products and split test between them, but also perform multivariate tests on differnet layout elements.

If there is some way you can create the landing page such that you are not constrained by the shopping cart, even just for one item, thus you might grab the html from an existing page then modify it by hand without theme limitations for the whole site.

I have no idea what might have been happening with your quality score through all these tests, but a different quality score could affect your ad position or bid price on just a few keywords... and those happened to be the ones that bring in the conversions.