Firstly what Is a call to action, well its something that engages the user and makes them want to do whatever it is you want them to do. One example would be a banner advert, we see these at the top of most sites so it’s a good place to start. Banners generally have very low CTR (click through rates) and its because people have become immune to them but one thing most will have in common is the last frame will generally have a call to action, “book now” “click here” some piece of text, or an image that makes the user click that banner, after all that’s the banners purpose, to get a user to click it.
Now as I mentioned banners aren’t the best for advertising as people don’t really pay much attention. One step above banners are text links which usually have a much better CTR firstly because they don’t look like adverts but also because they can be customised to give an even stronger call to action. So if for example you have 2 paragraphs about the beaches in Puerto Pollensa, Majorca by then adding a few text links, listing the hotels around this area the CTR would be massively increased. By actively working in links you make the audience more targeted and mre likely to lcick through as you are integrating the advert rather than having a defined advert and then a separate page body.
Taking things one step further – search boxes. Now this has worked exceptionally well for one of our affiliates very recently, and we’re talking in the past few days. A quick overview, they were doing something which anyone could do in theory, they were listing our hotels by resort and destination, filtering by star rating and hotel name. Alongside each hotel listing there’s a photo, description, hotel address and rating (all supplied by us), there were also a variety of text links, all of which as far as im concerned were good calls to action text such as “more information”, “check availability” and “read reviews”.
However sales weren’t that great. After a bit f a think we decided to set up some search boxes for each listing. Basically allowing a user to enter their date of checkin, how many nights, room type, number of people and preferred currency. Now if you think about this a form actively invites a used to do something, its very easy to fill in a form and click submit so you have a massively increased CTR. But another effect of this is conversion if someones actively doing a search, and seeing the results load on the Alpharooms.com site they are much more likely to book as they an see how much it would cost them, and they can see that the rooms are available. Text links and banners would mean that the user has to them start over once they land on the Alpharooms.com site.
The overall effect the search boxes have had on this affiliates site? Well they have gone from asking me to put through text transactions to make sure tracking works to doing numerous sales per day and not needing any tests! It’s great when things work out and I now look forward to seeing their affiliate ID show up daily on my sales reports.
So, what have we learnt here today, the further you can land a customer into the booking process the more chance they have of converting into a sale.
