Nothing can undermine the effectiveness of a pay-per-click (PPC) marketing campaign like a bad landing page (also called “marketing page” in the industry). You could send the most qualified traffic to it, only to have your hot prospects bouncing off to a page they can truly relate to. Since we don’t want you to do that, we’re giving you ten quick and helpful tips that will improve the quality of your marketing pages so that you don’t have to worry about throwing your money away.

1. Make It Specific
What demographic are you targeting? Where do they live? What kinds of unique products and services are they looking for? A good landing page will clearly answer all of these questions for a unique type of visitor that you are driving to it via PPC keywords and text ads. Never think of a landing page as a multi-purpose page. A real estate broker who tries to sell homes in all of Arizona on one page will have a much harder time convincing potential clients that he is a local expert than one who sets up a custom-tailored marketing page for every community in Arizona he serves.

2. Make It Current
You don’t have to real the news headlines and update your landing page every day, but it never hurts to ride the waves of holiday sentimentality and construct pages that run promotions geared towards those nationally treasured occasions. Also, stop using “Welcome to Anytown!” on your landing page, it’s not 1997 any longer!

3. De-Sleaze It
Unless successful sales tactics for your industry dip into car salesman-like depths of moral compass, there’s no sense to try and amp up your landing page with cliched buzz words. Believe it or not, the first thing web shoppers are trying to do is quickly find out if your site is “full of it” or not. If the marketing page contains little factual information or appealing offers, you can rest assured that your visitors will bounce faster than one of those rubber balls you buy out of a quarter machine at the grocery store.

4. Earn the Trust of Your Visitors
Is your landing page doing all it can to assure those who see it that you are worthy of their trust? Do you have current client testimonials on it? Do your forms contain privacy disclaimers and anti-spam logos? Is a human picture on it? Making the page as “human” as possible with pictures, quotes, and statements that bring the complexities of your online order system down to a better comfort zone will only increase your conversions.

5. Follow Eye Drift
Ah, the magic of our ingrained cultural tendencies. Since the western world reads from left to right and from top to bottom, it surfs pages nearly the same way. Below your header, if you have one, you should always have the most important image or offer in the upper left corner. That’s where people are looking for grounding, that this page contains exactly what they were looking for. To the right is where you want to hit them with an opportunity to convert immediately, if you haven’t already given them the chance. A side note with eye drift: even though the above example is two-column, single column formats can work really well too with this because they force the visitor to follow the page straight down.

6. Label It Properly
Did you title the page with the keywords and text ad offer that referred the visitor to it? Are your meta keywords and description also in line with them? And what about your h1 tags? If you don’t make sure the entire landing page delivers the right language to the visitor, not only does it increase the chances that they will bounce, but there’s also a good chance the search engines (like Google) will penalize you with a poor quality score for having what appears to be an irrelevant marketing page to the keywords you’ve bid on. And the end result of that is less visitors at a higher average cost-per-click (CPC).

7. Keep It Above the Fold
If your visitors can’t see it right away, there’s a good chance they won’t ever. Don’t ever assume that even a majority of your traffic will take the time to scroll down the page. Put everything that’s important in the top 500 or so pixels of the page. That way you can rest assured that most browsers will display all the information you need your prospective buyers to consider, and maximize your chances of making an impression.

8. Ample Opportunity to Convert
What good is all the information your qualified online shoppers are looking for without frequent and compelling chances for them to do business with you right away. Unless your industry usually makes “soft sales,” we recommend hitting people with an offer right after your first piece of information. Whether it be a picture of your featured product, or a well-worded introduction to your company, it never hurts to let the people who are ready to buy now do so.

9. Optimized Forms
Are your forms asking for too much information? Do they ask for information over several forms, allowing for individual customization of each user’s opt-in to your offer? The more you make the forms simple, nice looking, functional, easy to understand, and capable of reacting correctly to input, the less likely you are going to have people leave the page because your page is either too confusing or intrusive.

10. Make It Legible
This could very well be the most important tip in the list. Are your fonts white on black, black on white, or another high-contrast pairing? Do you avoid the overuse of italics and small type size? Are your paragraphs well-formatted? Are they free of spelling and grammar mistakes? If all of these conditions are not met, you are selling your campaign short by making your landing page difficult to read, and therefore less compelling.

BigSERP runs effective internet marketing campaigns of all shapes and sizes, operating on the west side of Los Angeles, California.

It’s always most important to base all your Google marketing decisions upon what returns the highest return on investment (ROI), not whether your marketing reaches everyone in the search engine marketing world. That being said, have you ever wondered just how much of the PPC market you are saturating with your Adwords advertising? Tracking that would enable you to get a feel for the relative impact of your targeted campaigns on specific geographic areas, which can help you make decisions on where to boost your budgets, decrease funding, or reallocate elsewhere.

The great news is that the Google Adwords Reports tool now allows you to tell what your Impression Share (IS) is. According to the Google Adwords blog, it means the percentage of the time your ads show related to the total possible chances they could be served, based upon the account or campaign settings that the report is being run for. So you can run the report in such a way that you can find out what your share is for particular terms in specific cities, states, or countries.

We’ve already found it incredibly useful in the field of real estate, where knowing how much draw you have in different communities can make a world of difference. We’ve already been drawing up plans to refocus all our campaigns so that they more aggressively target the areas that our clients don’t have as strong a presence in. It has also been helpful in that we can be more direct with our clients as to how competitive their respective pay per click markets really are. It definitely takes some of the guesswork out to be able to say with confidence that your client has a very strong share in their market. So thank you, Google, for continuing to make the entire Adwords operation more transparent.

Definitely start using the Impression Share metric today, and report back any other helpful uses you’ve found for this new Adwords functionality.

These days it’s a popular thing, particularly among real estate agents, to go bashing pay-per-click as a legitimate marketing strategy. Two of the most popular criticisms I hear are that PPC does not generate a significant amount of traffic, and that landing pages don’t perform better then if we just sent all the traffic to their home page. The first thing I do when I hear either one of these is pull open Google Analytics (you did install that, right?) and see what’s what.

The new reports module for Analytics is freaking awesome. I have to say it again; it’s awesome. My favorite new ability is to be able to easily compare the performance of landing pages with the entire site. It’s as simple as clicking on the ‘Content’ button on the left-hand side and then clicking on the name of your landing page. What you will then see is an overview of that page’s peformance. You can choose to Analyze ‘Entrance Sources’ or ‘Entrance Keywords’ and be able to rattle off a number of impressive stats about the site in question:

1. The percentage of the site’s total unique page views that are generated through PPC that is funneled towards that landing page.
2. The bounce rate of the landing page vs. pages on the site as a whole.
3. The average amount of time people spend on the landing page vs. pages on the site as a whole.

Armed with these facts, most of the time what I can say to my client with supreme confidence is that PPC represents a large percentage of their daily traffic. I can also confirm with them that their landing page has a lower bounce rate than the site itself (because the marketing is so focused on delivering just what people are searching for). And that people are spending on average more time on the landing page than on the site itself.

Dropping those kinds of bombs on a client can certainly bring up some fiery questions about the quality of the site being advertised. In the end, when you are doing everything on your side to make sure that the PPC campaigns and landing pages are set up right, what ultimately makes pay-per-click ineffective is the product that is being sold. Sometimes there’s no way to ‘polish a turd’ enough to turn it into the Lexus the client wants it to seem to its visitors. In those cases, they are in need of a serious marketing consultation and revamping of the website so that it can deliver upon what is advertised so well.

In my line of work, you get a lot of people who are very anxious about their marketing; when are their ads serving, how frequently, for what terms, etc. I’ve had clients that have told me that they check out their ads throughout the day to make sure that they are where they ‘need to be’ (whether that’s actually the case or not). Well ever since I saw Google post on the Adwords Blog that improper monitoring of ads can cause significant damage to account performance, I’ve been harping to all my clients that their curious impressions may be doing far more harm than good!

First off, as many of us know already, Google adjusts quality score based upon the search account’s click-through rate (CTR). So the more times you view an ad without actually clicking on it, your CTR suffers. When this happens over the course of weeks, where a high-maintenance client feels the need to search for their ads hundreds of times, you can see how this can have a serious impact on CTR.

What I didn’t know until now was that Google will also adjust ad position based upon whether you click on an ad or not. So if you search for yourself at the top of the rankings time after time, and don’t click on your ad, eventually Google will knock you out of the top spot based on your personal preferences. Imagine how this only multiplies the anxiety a misinformed client already has about where their ads serve. Even if their ads are #1 across America, they might get to the point where they hardly see their ads serve on the first page at all.

Yesterday was the day to start informing all of your clients about the proper way for them to test out where their ads are serving: by using the Ad Preview page at http://google.com/adpreview. You can do all the same searches you normally would, but these impressions will not count against your statistics. Believe me, doing this has already started saving money for my clients and resulted in more cost-effective advertising.

From my experiences it appears that Google has a short-term memory when it comes to CTR, so you can start seeing the benefit of this pretty much as soon as you start using it. Although I’m still not certain how the personalized search functionality plays into this. You might have to clear out your browser cache if the ads still don’t serve in high positions on your machine. Please ad to this with anything you’ve noticed in regards to this.

I moonlight as a singer/songwriter in the Los Angeles area. As an SEO/PPC expert, I’ve always wondered if setting up a Google Adwords content network campaign might be an effective way to get some new ears on my music. So today I embark on a SEM experiment that targets the fans I want to get. Explaining how I’m setting up the campaign is a textbook way to demonstrate what factors into a quality content network campaign. Even though this campaign targets the music industry, these same steps can be used to target any industry-specific demographic you’re looking to advertise to. This is also an open invitation to anyone who has already set up a successful campaign like this to add their two cents, although I suspect most music industry types aren’t the kind to share what they’ve found to work. That makes you ask why I would tell you what I’m doing? Well, I’m from the midwest, and we’re usually not the type to cut our wrists over helping others out.

First off, what I’ll do is figure out what kind of fans I want. A lot of people have told me I sound like a mix of John Mayer, Jack Johnson, Elliott Smith, and countless other male indie rock/pop artists. I want to get the general traffic that would dig that type of music, but I also want to target someone more specific as well. So what I’ll do is set up four initial groups:

1. Targeting John Mayer fans.
2. Targeting Jack Johnson fans.
3. Targeting Eco-activists (Note: I’m not a bleeding liberal, but as many of my Santa Monica neighbors, I strongly believe in paying due respect to mother nature).
4. Targeting fans of my favorite music.

Now take into consideration that content network campaigns must be set up entirely differently than regular search network campaigns. We’re not targeting as specific demographic, and we can’t be as specific to Google about the kind of pages we want to show up on. But the cool thing about content network is that we can use a bunch of general, broad keywords, and Google will take all of them into account as a whole. The result is that Google actually gets very close to figuring out the kinds of pages you’ll want to show up on!

For the John Mayer and Jack Johnson campaigns, I’m putting about forty general music keywords in, many of them pertaining to music genres that are similar to mine. I’m also throwing in some good action phrases like “buy music” and “listen to new music.” Then I’m adding a dozen or so additional phrases for each that pertain most to the individual artist who’s fans I’m trying to steal. I mean get to listen to my stuff. For example, for Jack Johnson, I’m adding phrases like “brushfire fairytales,” “jack johnson lyrics,” and “john mayer.” Why would I add “john mayer”? Well, it so happens a lot of Jack Johnson fans are also John Mayer fans, and vice versa. See how this works?

Next comes the text ads. You really have to consider exactly what kind of surfer is viewing the page. You want to try, as much as possible, to get them away from the content that’s more specific than yours. So your call to action better be really good and relevant. Here’s one of the ads I’m running:

Johnson’s Indie Alter Ego
Think Jack Johnson With More Umph
And Just As Much Heartfelt Writing.
ClinebellMusic.Com

Note how it’s targeting his listeners by giving them a frame of reference. Maybe they’d like someone with more umph? Actually, I don’t want Jack Johnson fans who don’t like a little umph listening to my songs because there’s less a chance they would buy my CD. So that’s why I’m still being very specific in the ad. I’ve got several others that ask specific questions like “Do You Like Great Lyrics?” and “Looking For New Artists?” in order to catch those people who are on specific kinds of pages. As with all ads, it’s usually a little trial and error to see what actually works.

As far as bidding goes, I’m starting out with a very low CPC. I don’t want to burn through too much budget initially. Even if my $.25/click max doesn’t yield impressions at first, that’s okay. I’ll just incrementally boost the groups until each one starts to get a healthy amount of quality traffic (leading to comments on my blog, MySpace adds, CD sales, song downloads, etc.).

I don’t have much time to go into all the details on the “Eco group” and the one targeting all the music I love, but the main differences between all of these groups are the dozen or so more specific phrases that give each group its own unique identity as a whole. In the “Eco group” I added phrases like “an inconvenient truth” and “save the world.” And for the group targeting people who’d like similar music to me, I just basically added my favorite bands list from myspace.

I’m really curious as to how this campaign will work out. I’ll definitely keep you posted, because right now I just don’t see really aggressive media targeting of the PPC markets.

Boring as they might be at times, still one of the biggest tools in your lead generation arsenal these days are forms. Forms not only give you a way of contacting your visitors, they can also be powerful pre-qualifying tools. For newbies, the key is making sure you don’t make a colossal mistake like asking for too much from your visitors. In fact, figuring out just the right amount of information to ask for is crucial to your online business.

As a general rule, concerning the information required on your lead generation forms, the more data you ask for up front, the less likely someone is to fill out the form. So logic dictates that you should figure out what you really need from your visitors. If you need more than a few fields of information from the visitors you’ve driven to your form from a landing page or other marketing (some forms, such as those that add a visitor to an email list, should only require 1 field!), then you should break apart your form into several, more easily digestible forms.

If you offer many different services, and want to offer them on the same page, there are some really cool things you can do with interactive forms. For example, you can ask for basic contact information on the first form. Then, on the second form, you can ask a question that qualifies your visitor. Based on the answer to that form, the next form can be customized to ask just the right follow up question.

So to sum it up, definitely don’t ask for too much information from your visitors. Whenever possible, stagger larger forms into multiple smaller ones. And finally, use the power of scripting to make interactive forms that make your visitors feel like they are only entering in information that pertains to what they are looking to buy from you!

Should you need professional assistance optimizing your website’s forms, the SEO analysts of BigSERP.Com offer their expert services at a competitive rate, and always with a free initial consultation.

In our line of work we must get asked about it hundreds of times a year, so it makes sense to dedicate a post to the topic: getting your site 24/7 coverage on the search engines. Most want to know what it takes to get to that point. We’ll run you through a common mistake, and then the best strategy.

Many of our PPC clients initially don’t opt into any natural strategies (despite our warnings) because most of them have a large up-front cost associated with them. These same clients find themselves wondering why their ads aren’t serving all the time at top positions in the SERP. It’s hard for many to accept, but quite often ad budgets simply will not allow for day and night coverage for those highly-relevant, coveted terms. What’s even worse about this is that the reaction of some of these clients is to then throw more money at PPC, forcing their way to the top against our recommendations. In the end, they end up with a relatively small amount of high-quality traffic that isn’t cost-effective, and has no long-term value to the site. Don’t make the same mistake they quite often do: let us implement for you a blended online marketing strategy that gets your site ranked on the first page twice!

Of course, we’ll still set up a PPC account for you. But instead of going for position #1, we’ll do some “position surfing” to get you quality traffic at a price that won’t break your bank each month. Then we’ll take an initial budget and dedicate it to two things that your marketing strategy should not be without: highly relevant SEO content that targets specific key phrases that you want to show up for in the SERP, and link building campaigns that will generate valuable inbound links to your site from high ranking, relevant sources. And then we’ll re-allocate part of your PPC budget to both content and link maintenance, meaning we’ll continue to build on the robust content and rich inbound links coming into your site on a monthly basis.

The end result, as we have seen for so many of our clients, is first page placement not only on the PPC results, but also in the natural SERP. And when you have both of those, it more than doubles the chances you’ll get a click, and also keeps a competitor out of one of those slots!

So definitely utilize this combined marketing strategy to the fullest. And don’t hesitate to contact us if you’d like a quote on having BigSERP professionally set it all up for you… we’re here to help you achieve your online marketing goals.

You must be selective with the keywords you choose when setting up your PPC campaign, or it is doomed to fail right from the very beginning. The more specific you are in selecting phrases that describe your products and services, the higher the quality of traffic you will receive. That’s not to say you can’t bid on general terms, but if you make the rookie marketing mistake of bidding for too general of terms, your boss will pull the plug on your PPC experiment faster than you can say “zero conversions for the month.”

Our first recommendation is to start out very conservatively, bidding only on very specific phrases (that show a high search volume using something like the Google Adwords Keyword Tool) and running them as Exact Match terms in a campaign that only serves on the search engine’s primary search. You’ll know if you’re being too general: you’ll get tons of traffic quickly and spend a lot of money without getting any leads or sales from it. That’s why it’s very important to not only start out slowly, but also know how to spot out a “bleeder” term when you’ve got one.

It’s not rocket science. Just run your campaign for a day or two and see which terms are getting you the most traffic, or which ones are costing you the most. Are those terms resulting in conversions, or at least showing a high clickthrough rate? Those are both indications that your terms are working, or at least may work with some adjustments. If you’re spotting any key phrases that are not yielding a healthy percentage for clickthrough or conversion, then you need to pull the plug on them ASAP.

We will on occasion rerun the terms that originally seemed like bleeders, because the markets fluctuate greatly to the point where a wasteful term can become a useful one overnight, and vice versa. Just don’t be afraid to pull the plug for good one an overly general term though. Your productive terms, and your boss, will love you for it!

1. High Position Equals High Value

For high-end companies with ocean deep pockets looking to use the search engines as their own digital billboard, sure, it’s worth the price to pay and get into the top positions for your ppc keywords. But for most small businesses, the cost/benefit analysis will show that over the long term it’s not worth it to push yourself into that prime real estate when what you’re looking for is a significant quantity of quality traffic. That’s the key with setting up a lead generation campaign; finding how little you can pay to get into a good enough position on the first page to get you conversions. So definitely don’t shoot for the sky right off the bat. You’ll likely waste a lot of money before you find that the optimal ROI is further down the page.

2. More Keywords Equals Better Results

Yes, we’re all very proud that you know ten different ways to say “widgets,” but are they all common uses of the term? Is there the potential for any of them to get confused for a different product or service than what you’re offering? And most importantly, are they all the ways that someone who’s looking to pay money for your products and services would phrase things? When faced with questions like these, it’s clear that for your ppc lead generation campaign, you should think long and hard about your keywords. Less can always be more if you pick the right combinations of keywords and key phrases.

3. Don’t Need A Landing Page

Why design an entirely separate page to advertise an individual product or service to my ppc visitors when I’ve got a beautifully crafted home page to point them to? Well, that’s not always an easy question to answer. If you’re just running a branding campaign, then you’d obviously want your visitors all funneled towards the face of your website. And depending upon how you have your website set up, it can act as a landing page. The biggest issues that most home pages have is that they have a lot of navigation options that can make it easy for your visitor’s attention to drift from why you brought them there in the first place: to buy a specific product! Also, the buttons and links on home pages are often set up into directory-like categories instead of appealing calls to action. If you plan on using your home page as your destination URL, then ask yourself this question: Would this look good in print as an advertisement? If you’ve got too much Flash animation and a simple navigation scheme, without reinforcing the offer that you put in your text ads, then your home page definitely won’t optimize your lead generation campaign’s conversions.

4. I Only Need One Landing Page

Ideally, you should have a separate landing page for each of the specific service or products that you are offering. This gives you the opportunity to concentrate on the SEO of each page, and writing copy that makes you seem like an authority when it comes to that individual product or service. This in turn leads your visitor, who usually typed in a very specific key phrase to get to you, to find exactly what they are looking for on your page and nothing else to distract them/scare them off. If you’re going to have several products share a landing page, for heaven’s sake at least make sure the products are closely related. If you can come up with a catch-all phrase to sum up all of the products as a group then that’s the ideal way to set up a multi-product/service landing page for a lead generation ppc campaign.

5. Ad Scheduling Doesn’t Make A Difference

They’ll stumble out of bed in the middle of the night and type in something, anything. They’ll be up so late trying to figure out how to pay the bills next week that they can’t even remember what they were searching for. They’ll be killing five minutes while making dinner for the family, and their heart won’t be into making an online purchase at the moment. You should avoid having any of these people view your ads by utilizing the power of ad scheduling in your lead generation campaigns. Your ppc budget will thank you by having more money around to put towards people who are awake, on a break, and not temporarily financially crunched.

6. I Can Monitor Every Week And Be Okay

It’s only after blowing through tons of cash while your guard is down that you realize how fast the search markets can change. As much as you can use budgeting, scheduling, and just good old proper ppc campaign setup to your advantage, there’s no better way to make your budget work for you than to get involved with your lead generation campaign on a daily basis. Just a half an hour a day will not only let you make necessary ppc budget adjustments and try new text ad variations, it will also give you a bit of time to slowly chip away at the stuff you really need to be utilizing: analytics.

7. Text Ads Just Have To Get The Job Done

You’re the kid yelling out on the street corner selling papers. And you’re hungry. So is your family. You’d better think of something good to say, cause you’ve only got a couple seconds (if that), and you need to start putting some bread on the table. That’s the mind set you need to have when writing text ads, because if you just throw them together it will show. Well-constructed ppc ads have a polished look to them. Some of them grab attention visually. Others rely on great calls to action to motivate people to click on them. So experiment and find the style that works best for your business. And don’t blaze through writing them.. the results usually aren’t pretty.

8. I Only Need Keywords In My Ad Title

You shouldn’t just place Keywords in your ad title, and then say whatever you want in the rest of the ad. You should have keywords in the title, both description lines, the display URL and the destination URL. Just make sure that you word things so that it doesn’t sound like a random collection of keywords. And if you wanna be sneaky, you can always try some nifty tricks like creating shapes out of the keywords that are in bold when your ads serve. If there is a common keyword phrase that has three words to it you are bidding on, try putting one of the keywords at the beginning of the ad title, another at the end of the first line of the description, and another in the beginning of the second line of the description. What you’ve done, my friend, is create an arrow that leads the visitor to view your ad instinctively! And that’s the kind of creativity that will reward you with results in your ppc lead generation campaign.

9. One Campaign Is Easier

What’s easy rarely makes you rich. Now when it comes to a ppc campaign, you can’t settle for throwing all your keywords into one group with one campaign and expect to get the best bang for your buck. Not to mention you can’t even effectively track what types of traffic are getting you the best results. So if you’re a widget dealer throughout the southwestern U.S., set up campaigns for all your geographic targets. After you launch them all, you’ll notice which ones are flying out of the gate, which ones are keeping up, and which ones need you to pick them up off the ground (or bury them!). Also, you’re gonna get bonus points for setting up Groups for each specific product or service. That way you’ll know what your big sellers are. If you’re running a national campaign, you can use separate campaigns for your products instead of geographically targeting the campaigns. You get the same benefit: separating your product/service lines so you can evaluate what’s getting you the most out of your lead generation campaign.

10. Keywords Are Easy To Figure Out

You may think you know a lot about your target demographic, what they would search for, what’s gonna make you rich. Just stop with it already. You can’t possibly conceive of how rapidly the markets change. What might seem like a traffic gold-mine can be a term that no one in ten years would ever search for. So instead of thinking you know what’s your optimal keyword list and just going for it, do some homework with Google’s keyword tool, researching your competition, and reading a few more posts like this one before you start to structure your keyword lists to optimize the leads you generate through your ppc campaign.

We’ve found that the buzz is true; turning off Google’s Search Network and running your campaign on Google search alone is the best way to go. A lot of the Search Network traffic (we’re not talking about Content Network, but Google’s affiliate search partners) doesn’t carry much value because a large majority of it comes from parked domains with a generic search box, spam directories and portals, and other low-content sites. Some accounts we’ve nearly run into the ground sharply avoid hitting the runway after we turn off Search Network, and then perform exceptionally well. It’s just one more tool in your PPC management arsenal, so don’t forget about it!

Google’s products are great, and we’re sure that they will eventually figure out a way to phase this horrible waste of marketing dollars that’s currently called Search Network out of the picture. But there’s no sense in you helping them (in an expensive and ineffective way) through the tranisition. If you can’t find enough traffic on Google search alone, then by all means set up separate campaigns with slightly less relevant keywords or on the Content Network, with a different bidding and ad strategy, but don’t use Search Network until they clean it up first.