Over the next few weeks on the Conversion Room we are going to look at how real companies have used conversion tools to improve their ROI. We will also hear tips from our network of Google Conversion Professionals on how they help clients improve their online profitability.


This week, Next share with us how they improved their conversion rate by 103% on high traffic keywords.

Next's PPC keywords 'catalogue' and 'directory' drove high volumes of traffic to their site. In fact, these keywords represented 30% of Next's overall PPC traffic. The Next team noticed that while these keywords brought lots of visitors to their site, the visitors were likely to bounce - or leave the site straight away. Having identified this trend in Google Analytics Next looked at their site. The keywords 'catalogue' and 'directory' both led to a catalogue sign up page.

In an attempt to reduce the bounce rate, Next tested sending visitors on these valuable keywords to their homepage instead. The results were dramatic, bounce rates decreased by 37% as more people were spending more time on the site. As a result sales increased, and these keywords experienced a 103% increase in conversion rate and 107% increase in per visitor value.

Catalogue page

Home page

What can you do next?

Check out the following report within your Google Analytics accounts: Traffic Sources >> AdWords, then look at the bounce rate for various keywords that drive traffic to your site.

Examine the relationship between keywords with a high bounce rate and the URLs these visitors are sent to.

Could visitors searching on your keywords be brought to a more relevant landing page?

Next are just one of the companies that have shared conversion improvement success stories with us. Read more about Next and others in the Conversion Centre. You can also learn more about our Google Conversion Professionals programme and how they could help you improve your site's profitability here.


Posted by Evelyn O'Keeffe, Google Analytics Team.