PPC Landing Page: Are they aligned ?

Let's start off the year with a quick look at a PPC campaign which is running LIVE on Google as of this writing and how we could learn and apply from here. If this is your first time here, do take a look at my last post on what's in for your website visitors and do share your thoughts with us in this post.

Let's do a Google on "storage for paintings" and imagine ourself in need of more space for storing our lovely painting collection.

And here's the first position ad:




Seems like they are essentially squeezing all their product offerings onto this ppc ad, wishing the potential customer / searchers will click onto it just because they have everything listed on the ad. Does the ad seems only understandable to the company offering this ? Or should it be the other way round ? No Call to Action found. What's in for the potential customer ? What are they really looking for ? What's the benefit other than as low as $50 ?

Now moving onto the landing page:



Once landed onto the landing page, searchers are left to figure out why they are here in the first place. What's next for the searchers ? What's the desirable action ? What's in for them ? The story doesn't ends here by just throwing them onto a generic landing page. Is it really worthy to spend the money driving interested searchers onto your landing page and after which having them to bounce out in a few seconds just because they can't find what they were promised or looking for.

Even having a highly motivated searcher with the intent to seek the solution themselves through clicking onto the Contact Us button; additional voluntary steps will have to be initiated by them in either dialing the number or email listed on the section. How many searchers would be willing to go the extra mile for you ?



Now Your Turn.
What other learnings could we add on ?

What's In for your website visitors ?

Doesn't matter if you have the best structured ppc campaigns, high click through rates or great ad copies for all your ppc campaigns.














Before you get really excited about it, do you know what happens next after your visitors lands onto your website ? The "What's in for me" objective starts to kicks in for visitors whom came onto your website because of what they were told earlier on in your ppc ads, so does your landing page offer what they were looking for ?

If Yes...good job...however the journey does not ends here....did they eventually completed the goal or objective which you hope they would do so (Be it signing up for your newsletter, filling up a form,etc...) once they landed onto your landing page ? Did they take action ?

If No....Why ? And Why not ?

Today in this post, I will be sharing some tips which you should give it a try and let the data speaks for itself:

• What's the goal / objective once your ppc visitors lands onto your particular landing page ?
• Instead of landing your ppc visitors onto your generic homepage, try sending them to a customized page which is relevant to what they were looking for when they were clicking onto your ppc ads earlier on.
• Test which ppc ad copies work best for the individual landing pages (product/info /etc)
• Split testing your ppc ad copies constantly.
• Start small and learn from your testings before scaling up.
• Once you're confident enough, try Google Website Optimizer in testing different elements of your landing page; finding out which elements work together best in achieving higher conversions for your landing page goals / objectives.

If you're really serious about getting better ROI for your ppc campaigns, try the above mentioned tips,not only will you get higher conversions but also getting to understand more about your website visitors' behavior and in turn creating more targeted and relevant content for them.

To end this post with a mantra: Learn, Analyze, Test, Repeat*
Agree or Disagree ?
Your Turn Now !

2008 PPC Learnings

2008.
With 2008 coming to a close,have you reflect back regarding your search campaigns in 2008 ? What can you learn and leverage for 2009 ?

Here's some learnings to share for 2008:

Daily Budget:
How better to blow your budget overnight ?
- Setting a newly revised daily budget and going for a holiday, going for a few day retreat, ignoring the budget over the weekend. Get ready to burn off your budget when you try the above mention.

Keywords
- Bidding on high click through keywords which has zero or very low conversion rates.
- Over bidding on keywords without having taken into consideration of your revenue / profit per conversion.
- Paying for negative keywords without knowing (Failure to run the reports in identifying the negative keywords which are costing you money but zero / low conversions)
- Lumping all your keywords all onto a single ad group when you should be segmenting them individually onto respective relevant ad groups.

ZERO testing:
- Simply just running your only ad copy without any alternative copy in testing which has a better conversion rate. No split / AB testing conducted.
- Which elements of the landing page are better enticing the prospects in converting ? (Call to action button, colours, hero image, form fields, copy content)

Generic Landing Page:
- Simply send all your potential customers to a generic page without a goal in mind; paying for all the clicks but zero conversions. When you should be sending them to respective product / promotions / information page.

Your Turn.
PPC search campaign learnings to share ?

Optimize your PPC campaigns

2008.
The year is coming to an end.
How much are you spending on search marketing ?
Are your marketing dollars well spent ?
Or are you throwing your $ out of your window ?

So how do you better optimize your ppc campaigns ?
Enough said, here's some quick tips to implement now.

PPC elements optimization:

Negative keywords
* Removal of non-performing keywords which are not converting but costing $

Split testing
* Any split test conducted on a on-going basis ?
* Which ad group is converting better ? In individual countries ? In seasonal period ?
* How long is the test conducted ? Too long ? Too Short period ?

Historical keyword performance
* What's the historical keyword performance of individual ad groups / campaigns ?


Other on-page elements to test:

Call to Action Button
* Colour - which colour on the cta button converts better ? In different countries ? In different seasonal period ?
* Copy on cta - which copy on cta converts better ? In different countries ? In different seasonal period ?
* Shape - Which shape coverts better ? In different countries ?

Web Form
* Which part of your web form field is actually necessary ? Or which part of web form fields are hindering conversion rates ?
* Shorter web form field, have you tried testing the conversion after alteration ?

Landing Page Load Time
* How fast is your landing page loading ?
* What is the landing page individual document size ?
* What is the average Internet connection speed of your visitors ?

Landing Page Copy Font
* Is your landing page fonts visible ? (Even though visitors / potential customers scan web pages)
* Which Font size / colour converts better ? In different countries ?

Landing Page Friction Elements
* Which element of your landing page is actually hindering conversion rate ? (Don't make the visitors / potential customers think !)
* Are there any substantial claims or testimonials to support your copy content in reducing friction,thereby increasing trust factor ?

Implement this:
> Try using Google Website Optimizer, let the consumers test / decide for you, which on page elements work best at which country, for which seasonal period, for which promotional campaign, etc.

Test, Test, Test
Learn.
Optimize.
Re-Test, Re-Test

Are you testing ?

Optimize Your PPC

Where does all your visitors coming into your landing page or website ?From you PPC (Pay-Per-Click) ads ? Or from your organic search ?

If most of your traffic are coming based on your PPC ad campaigns, how can you increase the conversion rate or optimize it ? So as to allow your PPC ad campaigns to not only be cost effective in driving visitors and customers but also increase your overall conversion rate.

So how do you optimize your PPC (Pay-Per-Click) ads campaign ?

Deep Linking:
Don't lead your visitors to your default homepage or try to cross sell them. Instead lead them to the relevant or unique landing page related to the PPC ad. Try this and compare how your conversion rate increases as compared to leading them to irrelevant web page.

Relevant keywords:
Instead of targeting a general keyword term, target keywords that are specific and relevant to your product or service offering.

Deploy search term suggestion tools:
Try researching on your specific search terms with the suggestion tools offered by Google and other third party vendors and compiling your search terms research before submitting.

Listing on relevant sites that offer PPC ad service:
Having your PPC ads placement on relevant sites or your industry, you can be sure to be targeting the relevant visitors or audience. Thereby, maximizing your return on investment on your PPC ad and not wasting any dollar on blasting to visitors whom are not interested.

Relevant Copywriting:
Having relevant copywriting on the descriptions and headlines specific or relevant to the product or service you are offering rather than general terms.

Biding on lower value keywords:
You might be thinking why should I bid on lower keywords. Although biding on these keywords generate lower traffic as compared to higher value ones, however it does allows you to get the top position with just a very low bid. Though the traffic is low, you can be sure that the visitors coming to your website or landing page with their keyed in keyword is much likely to know what they are looking for.

Research Research:
The research doesn't stops here......you have to kept on researching and researching to understand what's the latest keywords or search term that are relevant to your keywords.

Research + Optimize

Free SEO tool

If you’re looking for a comprehensive SEO tool, try Web CEO, it’s FREE and some of the features found in it include:

• Helping you to find the best or top keywords and how you fare against the top 10 competitors.
• Analyzes pages for various search engine compliance.
• Helps you identify potential or existing problem by page of your web.
• Free search engine submission through the built-in submission tool found in the software, which means no more paying to submit your website.
• Check how many search engine link to any page of your website through the built-in Link Popularity Analysis tool.
• Check who links to you as well.
• Helps you to find link partners as well.
• Check all your PPC Campagins through this, a one-stop PPC management.
• Web analytics for your website.

Lastly, the monotonous part…..it also has the built-in website maintenance module.

Having said all this, it’s time for you to try it yourself and help boost your own website with the software. Here’s the link to the software download.

What SEO tools are you using ?
Please share your views and critique via the comments.

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