Welcome to my quick 2 minute version of “Landing Pages for Dummies.”

Landing pages play a huge role in the success of your online marketing efforts. Specifically your paid search campaigns.

I’ve had several clients or business owners seeking advice on whether they should close down their paid search accounts because their campaigns aren’t performing.

My first question is usually:

What’s your current conversion rate?

The answer back is usually:

“I don’t know”.

Whether your spending money via paid search or putting in hours of time writing quality content to get traffic to your site, you should know this simple metric. Rather than investing more money into your paid search budget, why not invest in your landing page instead?

Let’s start off by having me show you the “world’s greatest landing page”. Anyone want to take a guess? Well if you cheated and looked, which I’m sure you did, it’s Google.

All joking aside, Googles landing page is fantastic. It’s straight to the point, clean and it’s gotten the job done for the past 10+ years.

What’s makes a landing page convert?

When you ask it that way there are so many elements that come into play. Here are just a few to consider:

• Design - Is your site design user-friendly?
• Copy – Does your copy do a good job of promoting your offer to your visitors?
• Layout – When I get to your landing page is the layout clean and concise?
• CTA (Call to Action) - Are you telling your visitors what to do?
• Leaks – Do you have extra links that will leak out your visitors?

If you have a current landing page, are you covering these areas? If so, where do you see improvement?

TIP: Rather than guessing what areas to improve on or to test, use your site analytics to determine where the bottlenecks are.

In my opinion, it’s not JUST having the sexiest design or the most persuasive copy. Remember to tie every element together. Also, having consistency from your paid search ad to your even your thank you page will never leave a bad taste in your customers mouth.

How hard is your current landing page working for you?

Ultimately, it also depends on what the goal of your landing page is.

• Are generating leads or selling a products?
• Is your lead gen page a simple lead form or do you require a credit card?
• If you’re selling products, do you have a low price point or high price point?

When you consider these types of things, you begin to understand your potential customer. Put yourself in their shoes. Would you fill out your lead form? What differentiates yourself from your competitors?

My Formula to Highly Converting Landing Page

Here’s a quick landing page “check list” of things you should consider with your landing page.

1. Competitive Analysis — Research your competition. See if there are any gaps currently not being filled. Find out what they’re offering.  Bottom line though, research your competitors BUT don’t let your competition dictate what you do.

2. What’s your Offer? — From FREE Trials, FREE Shipping to Buy 1 Get 1 FREE, know what your offer is and stick to it. Don’t have a landing page that has multiple offers. It’s just straight up confusing.

3. Design/Creative — Let’s face it, we’re all not as talented as we’d like to think when it comes to pushing pixels. Just accept it and hire a freelancer to do it. Or if you have your in-house creative team let them tell you what looks best. There are 101 different landing page layouts. Avoid the design by committee and let the designer lay it out with what they think looks best. After you start collecting enough data you can test new layouts.

4. Development – Keep it simple stupid… for the user of course. Quick example, if you’re selling a product, be clear & concise. Your product should be displayed professionally with high-res images, wth a clear description and smooth checkout process.

5. Testing – Yes of course test your page for any bugs, but the testing I’m referring to is conversion testing. Consistent testing is crucial. From an entirely different layout to the color of your call to action button, testing will help you achieve a highr converting page.

[download]I want to put an emphasis on testing because I feel like conversion testing is just an after-thought to most. It’s completely under-utilized by most companies. C’mon people this is 2010 (close enough) and with all of the conversion testing tools at our fingertips, what are you doing?[/download]

6. Consistency – From start to finish. Same message. Same look and feel. Same offer. You get the point.

7. Miscellaneous Items – Here’s a few other random things in no particular order.

• Privacy Policy: You’d be surprised how many landing pages don’t let their visitors know what they do with their information and if it’s safe.
• Phone Number: I understand this can sometimes be a leak or you don’t have the luxury of a phone number but this allows your visitors the option of filling out your form or picking up the phone.
• Guarantee: 30 Day or Money-Back. Can you give your visitors a guarantee with your offer?

So there you have it. Short and sweet. If you’ve read this far I’m hoping it was valuable. If you have any additional ways to improve landings or anything worthy I can add to this post, let me know by leaving a comment.

As always, be sure to Subscribe to my RSS Feed or Follow @jrfarr on Twitter and I’ll catch you on the flip side.

Today I want to talk about writing compelling ad copy that will not only increase your CTR% (click through rate) but also lift your overall conversion rate. It’s easy to blame a poor conversion rate on your landing page but when your paid search campaigns aren’t “top notch”, that could be where the bottleneck is happening.

Obviously your shooting to have your ad copy “catch” the users attention BUT remember to also keep that compelling component go all the way through to the landing page.

C’mon, let me show you what I’m talking about.

Starting Point – The Ad

Let’s say for example I’m looking to purchase a new SLR camera lens for my Nikon D60. So I head over to Google and search for “Nikon D60 Lenses”. Seems like a logical keyword phrase to search right?

Well maybe… here are the top 3 results:

TIP: Out of the top 3 results, none of them are geared specifically for my keyword phrase.

I clicked on the 2nd ad and was directed to this landing page.

No way — Are you serious? Was my search that specific that you couldn’t point me in the right direction?

First of all with these being the top 3 results I was hoping for a little more specific ad copy. Gee I don’t know, how about a more targeted ad like this:

Nikon D60 Lenses (Solid keyword headline)
Wide Selection of Nikon Lenses. (A feature or benefit when visiting our website.)
Buy Today & Get Free Shipping! (Call to Action)
DigitalCameraInfo.com/Nikon-Lenses (Reinforcing the category or product once more.)

Dude Where’s my Car? errr… My Lens?

Sure out of the 3 ads, we’d expect that Amazon would take me to the right place but what’s with that ad copy? “Lens Nikon at Amazon“. What does that even mean? No, just because you put your brand name in your headline doesn’t mean I’m going to click on your ad. Sorry, but you have to try harder than that.

After clicking on the 2nd ad, I was not directed to the Nikon Lens page. This immediately made me want to click the back button.Why make the user dig through your site to find what they’re looking for?

Now, we’ll go into this later but the reason this ad was displayed when I searched this is because he’s buying the term Nikon D60 as a “broad match” term.

Broad Matching Terms: Allows your ad to show on similar phrases and relevant variations

This mistake goes back to my last article about the importance of paid search account structure. When you create tightly, crafted campaigns with 10-15 keywords you can avoid this costly mistake.

Wrap it Up with Common Sense

Do you necessarily need to make a Nikon D60 Lens ad group & a Nikon D40 Lens Campaign and so on? No, but if you want a better CTR and maximize your money, do it the right way and stop being lazy. If you’re not taking the time to setup these campaigns very specific, then you’re just throwing your money away.

Lastly, keep in mind that it’s not just your ad copy that’s saying something to your users… You’re landing page is part of the “pre-sale” process as well. Ensuring that your ad copy and landing page copy all mesh well together is key. My point to all of this is to make it easy, precise and to the point

Now go make sure you’re ad copy makes sense from start to finish.

Was this helpful? Let me know if I didn’t touch on something or you need more clarification. In the meantime be sure to Subscribe to my RSS Feed or Follow @jrfarr on Twitter for the next Rockstar PPC installment.

Alright, so now that you’ve gone through my “Define.Research. Deploy.” process, you’re ready to start setting up your paid search campaigns. Within that process you should’ve completed the following items:

• Define your Niche
• Research your competition within your niche using Keyword Research Tools
• Solidify your Objective
• Creating a compelling CTA (Call to Action)

With those items behind you, it’s time to talk about the setting up your paid search campaigns. What I mean by that, is how are you going to be organizing your account structure?

Why is Account Structure Important?

The last thing you want to do is start creating a bunch of random campaigns with no real direction. You’ll end up overlapping campaigns, have an un-organized account and will most likely cause you more work.

Back in the day, your campaigns would be stuffed with thousands of keywords with just a few ad groups. Now, I don’t ever have more than 10-15 keywords within an ad group.

Essentially, with a structured account, you’ll be able to pin-point any item you want in your account which allow for better management. No matter how granular you want to manage your account (e.g. down to the keyword level) you’ll know exactly where everything is within your account.

Paid Search Account Structure & How it Effects your Quality Score

I can’t emphasize enough how important your account structure is. This is one of the biggest factors when talking about Google’s Quality Score. In case you’re not familiar with the quality score, you need to definitely understand it before you setup a Google Adwords account. In short the Google Quality Score is:

The AdWords system calculates a ‘Quality Score’ for each of your keywords. It looks at a variety of factors to measure how relevant your keyword is to your ad text and to a user’s search query. A keyword’s Quality Score updates frequently and is closely related to its performance. In general, a high Quality Score means that your keyword will trigger ads in a higher position and at a lower cost-per-click (CPC).

Back in October of 2008 I did a post on “How to Help your Google Adwords Quality Score“. All of it is still relevant and will play a huge role in building up your quality score.

Inside Google Adwords (and Yahoo! & MSN, etc.) your account is laid out like this.

• Campaigns (e.g. Mens Nike Shoes)
  • Ad Groups (e.g. Nike Shox, Nike Air Max, Nike
  • Ad Copy
  • Keywords

TIP: The more specific you layout your campaigns the more specific your ad copy & keywords will be. Thus, resulting in better ROI and conversion rate.

Solid Account Structure = Extreme Relevance & Google Love

Google’s main goal with their search results is to be as relevant as possible. If you’re campaigns as relevant as possible, Google will reward you for your hard work & effort.

It’s easy to be lazy and throw up a few campaigns and a few ads. Try to avoid that and make it a goal to reach the maximum amount of campaigns within your account.

If you’re not shooting for that, you’re just being lazy.

Let’s look at a few examples

Let me show you a quick example of how a well structured campaign, makes you get more specific & relevant.

In this examples, I’m using the new Nike Shox that just came out, the “Nike Shox NZ id”. You could either setup your own Nike Shox campaigns or just add another ad group to a General Nike Shoes campaign.

If it were me, I would use the more specific example. (See below.)

Campaign Name: Mens Nike Shox
Ad Group: Nike Shox NZ id
Ad Copy:
Nike Shox NZ id
Customize your NZ’s with Nike ID.
Get 20% Off & Free Shipping Today!
www.JRazzlesShoes.com/Nike-Shox-NZ

When you setup your account strucutre this way, you have no choice but to have a very specific ad, that targets very specific keywords. This does a number of things. Compared to the other ads you’ll be displaying next to, you’re more likely to be clicked on and you’ll be linking to correct product page the consumer is looking for.

Here’s what happens when you don’t have account structure

When I searched for “Nike Shox NZ id” these were the top 3 ads to show up.

First thing you’ll notice is out of all 3 results, none of them use the descriptive ad copy to really “sell” the product. It’s unfortunate to see. In my opinion, if the account was structured in a precise manner, they would be much more specific for each product. For the most part, these ads are geared to just the Nike Shox shoe.

But after clicking on each of the ads, it get’s worst.

All of these ads failed to send the me, the visitor, to the appropriate landing page. Out of the 3, Footlocker was the worst, as it sent me to this page:

Uh — what is this?

I mean, it’s nice of you to show me your New Balance shoe collection but your ad told me it would take me to your Nike Shox? Seriously, Footlocker out of all sites out there too. I expect more out of a big company to have it more together. To me, this is a classic case of having an un-structured account which ultimately takes away your ability to manage your entire account.

Either way, just remember to keep it relevant. Having a well thought out account/campaign structure will give you the ability to manage your paid search campaigns at an optimal level.

If you’ve already created a few campaigns within your account, that’s ok. Next time you’re begin setting up new campaigns and ad groups, remember the importance of your paid search account structure.

Was this helpful? Let me know if I didn’t touch on something or you need more clarification. In the meantime be sure to Subscribe to my RSS Feed or Follow @jrfarr on Twitter for the next Rockstar PPC installment.

Twitter is about to “Cash In” all their Traffic

Have you seen Twitters new homepage? They just released it a few days ago. After one glance at Twitters new homepage, are you still thinking Twitter won’t find a way to make money?

Twitter has slowly been expanding their real time search functionality (search.twitter.com) and continues to make it more apparent to their users. The most recent is when they added the search box to the sidebar.

I think eventually, this sidebar will become a “Sponsored Results” section. And as an paid search advertiser myself, I would be a fool to not want to buy paid search ads on Twitter.

That’s exactly what Twitter is going to do.

Get ready for the new Google Adwords. Maybe Twitter Tweetwords

Is there a enough traffic and interest in the niche?

How competitive is that niche?

Well, you’ll be glad to watch this video if those are the questions you’re always asking. And as an added bonus it shows you how to find & explore entirely new niches for you to get into.

I hope you enjoy and any feedback or comments is always an added bonus for me!

The more Twitter followers you have, the more leverage you have to promote your brand or website. Before I list these 10 tips, just think about how important Twitter is when it comes to promoting your brand. It’s not hard to imagine that if you offer some type of value to people, naturally your Twitter followers will climb in a short amount of time.

Think about having 500 followers. You simply leave a quick “tweet” about a new post you wrote on your blog. You just advertised to 500 unique visitors for free! There’s also a good chance that a few of your followers will “re-tweet” your message to all of their followers as well!

The moral of my ramblings… Don’t underestimate the power of Twitter!

10 Ways to Get More Twitter Followers

1. Be Social: Be active with your followers – Reply to them, comment on what they’re doing.
2. Be Smart about who you Follow: Follow people with a large number of Followers and reply to them. Your replies will be in front of thousands of followers. Don’t follow someone just because they have a lot followers, be sure they are of interest to you as well.
3. Blog Posts: Have a blog? Guest posting on a blog? At the end of each post, ask people to follow you with a link to your Twitter profile.
4. Email Signature: Promote your Twitter account in your email signature.
5. Forums: When posting on forums, leave your Twitter profile with your signature on your threads.
6. Activity: Twitter more Often. When you use Twitter more people will find you through Twitter search.
7. Promote: Create a Twitter badge on your site promoting your Twitter profile.
8. Facebook: Facebook has an application that includes your Twitter updates. Add that application to your profile.
9. Other Social Networks: Add your Twitter Profile to all of your other social network profiles.
10. Acknowledgment: When you get a new follower send them a direct message and say “Thanks for Following.” They’ll be more likely to be an active follower and tell their fellow friends to follow you as well.

Does anyone else have any other tips on how to get more Twitter Followers?

This is what really busting my chops… over the last few months Twitter has hit mainstream and it’s off the chain. Along with Twitter, there’s also Facebook, YouTube and every other social network out there that are growing bigger and bigger everyday. This is all fine and dandy but now we’ve got every person on Twitter claiming they’re social media expert. Really? You’re kidding me right? So after a few months of “tweeting your tweets” and setting up a Facebook account you’re now a Social Media expert!?

I’m no expert that’s for sure and I’ve got plenty of learning to do still. If you want to see an expert in Social Media go read Chris Brogans’ blog.

Maybe I’m being a bit too harsh but if you agree with me can you let me know so I don’t think I’m crazy.

URL redirection, also called URL forwarding, domain redirection and domain forwarding, is a technique on the World Wide Web for making a web page available under many URLs.

Well for anyone in this situation there is a plugin available for WordPress that can help you fix this problem in 3.8 seconds

With this plugin, you can safely change your permalink structure without breaking the old links to your website,and even doesn’t affect your search engine rankings.

Enough with the talking already and on with the downloading!

DOWNLOAD: Dean’s Permalink Migration for WordPress

Installation

1. unzip and upload the file into your wp-content/plugins/ directory.
2. Activate it on your Admin Panel->Plugin Management page.

Usage

1. goto admin panel->options->PermalinksMigration.set the old permanlink structure of your site.
2. goto admin panel->options->Permalinks.change the new permalink structure to what you want. (personally I recommend /%category%/%postname%/)
3. Done,enjoy it.

A big thanks to Dean Lee for his awesome contribution to the WordPress community!

Bottom line, it’s clean and simple to navigate and lightening fast.

I wanted take a few screenshots and give some of you a quick sneak peek at the new look. It comes with a few new features and like I said, navigating throughout the system is much faster. Everything seems to shift and refresh with more of a Ajax type feel.

Ok, ok… enough with my obsession with the new interface and on with the screenshot goodness

Campaign Summary

When you login you’re presented with a nice clean “Campaign Summary” view:

(Click to Enlarge)

Super Fast Tab Navigation

Flip through the new tab nav within seconds, no waiting for the page to refresh.

Graph Metrics

New graph metrics are easily changable and again no waiting for the page to refresh.

(Click to Enlarge)

Dual Graph Metrics

New graph metrics are easily changable and again no waiting for the page to refresh.

(Click to Enlarge)

Campaign Views

A few things you’ll notice that have changed is the verbage their using. Instead of Resume and Pause, it’s now Enable and Pause.

(Click to Enlarge)

Ad Network Statistics

This is one of my new favorite features. You can now easily see the performance of not only the search and content network but even further beyond that. In the search network you can see the performance of both the Google Network and the Search Partners Network.

(Click to Enlarge)

Hopefully you got a good idea of what the new interface was like. When speaking with my Google Adwords rep, she said this would hopefully become available to most Adwords users over the course of this year. It really does have some great improvements and I have enjoyed working in the new interface. I need to take the time and let a few Google reps know that they did a great job in upgrading the new Adwords interface.

Has anyone else been put in the Beta test? What are you’re thoughts?