Whether you are running pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns, other paid advertising, or relying on organic search engine rankings, these tips on optimizing your landing pages will help you to achieve higher conversion rates on your website.

Are you getting traffic to your web site, but finding that visitors are not taking any action? The following suggestions will have you on your way to optimizing your landing page(s) thus, improving your conversion rates:

1. Focus your Landing Pages

Your landing pages should have one offer that you focus on in order to achieve higher conversion rates. If your visitors land on a page where there are many options, with many calls-to-action and paths they can take through your site, you are only losing focused attention on the primary goal. Whether your conversion is completing a lead form, making a purchase, or signing up for a newsletter or membership, make this the main intent of your page. Give your visitors too many choices, and you run a high risk of losing them. This term is called “abandonment”. Abandonment is when your visitors initiate an action, but do not follow through. Look at your landing pages, and identify potential “abandonment points”, and remedy the situation by eliminating them.

2. Present a Clear Call-to-Action

Tell your visitors what you want them to do. If someone is looking at your page, and you have their attention, compel them to take action. Let’s say, as an example, you are an investment broker, and you are looking to attract more clients. You should have a clear call-to-action that makes the user want to proceed, such as “Start Getting Better Returns Now”. As an additional point, you should have only one call to action on the page. In some instances there may be two, such as “Download Now”, vs. “Start your Free Trial Now”. Your one, clear, concise call-to-action should stand out on the page visually. You can do this through different text treatments or better yet, a nice, clean button.

3. Summarize Your Offer

People scan web pages, and decide very quickly whether or not their interest is piqued. Keep your body copy brief - bullet points of the key benefits of your product/offer are the easiest to read. If you need to explain further, summarize as much as possible, trying to have only one to two paragraphs of text on the page. The most important content is that which solves a problem or lets the user know “what’s in it for them”. Try to stay away from sing a lot of “marketing fluff”, and make the best use of all of the words you choose to use on the page.

4. Test, Analyze, Repeat

By A/B testing, you can narrow down what works and what doesn’t with your landing pages. A/B testing is running two landing pages against each other which have minor differences, and then measuring which one converts better. The differences should be minor, and changes that you make can be one of the following: call-to-action text, heading on the page, position of the form (right side vs. left side), bulleted copy on the page, even little changes can make a difference in landing pages, such as the color of the call-to-action button. Make one change at a time, and before you know it, you will end up with great improvements in your conversion rates.

5. Keep Copy and Keywords Consistent

If you are utilizing pay-per-click, link-building, or other contextual methods of bringing traffic to your landing pages, make sure that the ad creative copy is consistent with what the user will get when they come to the landing page. The bait and switch is not a good technique, and if visitors reach your landing page thinking that they are getting one thing, and then see something different, chances are they will bounce very quickly. Try to use the same calls-to-action as in your ad creative to give more consistency to your campaign. This also will save you from spending money on clicks from a PPC campaign that will be wasted.

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Tags: abandonment, campaigns, conversion rates, Getting Quality Website Traffic, improving your conversion, Internet marketing, offer, optimizing your landing page, Pay Per Click, PPC, Search Engine Marketing, search engine rankings, testing, traffic, web pages

Heather Lutze, CEO/Founder Lutze Consulting posted on her blog Pay Per Click Podcast about the importance of creating targeted landing pages in PPC campaigns. By listening to the reasoning of not using your home page as your landing page, and testing landing pages, I am sure that you will find higher conversion rates from your PPC campaigns. This post is a must-read, and must do to improve your PPC conversion rates and ROI.

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Tags: campaigns, conversion, landing pages, Pay Per Click, Pay-Per-Click (PPC), PPC, roi

Metrics to pay attention to when measuring the success of your PPC campaigns.

I talked in an earlier post about measuring and tweaking your PPC campaigns, so now I will let you know what metrics are important, and what to do with these metrics in order to improve your campaign.

ROI - ROI, or the return on investment, is the most important measurement of all, unless you are not using your PPC campaign for profit, and only for branding purposes. In order to measure your ROI, you will first need to know a couple of things.

1. What is your conversion, and how much is it worth?
For instance, if you are selling a widget, or many widgets, the amount you receive in profit for a purchase is what you will use for the equation.
2. What is your spend amount?
Spend can be determined in a lot of different ways, such as, total ad spend or the entire budget, total spend for a certain

After you have these metrics, all you need to do is take the total spend minus the profit you made, then divide that total by your spend. Here is an example:

You spend $1000 on a Google AdWords campaign, out of this, you obtain 12 sales, each giving you a profit of $110. So, from this campaign, you made $1,320. You spent $1,000 for the campaign, so your profit is $320 ($1,320-$1,000). The next step is taking your profit and dividing it by your spend ($320/$1000=.32). Your ROI is 30%.

CTR - CTR stands for Click-through-rate. CTRs are important in determining whether or not your creatives that you use for your keywords are effective. CTR is determined simply by taking the number of clicks you receive on your ad creative divided by the number of impressions. For instance, if your ad creative was shown 123 times, and clicked on 3 times, your CTR is 2.4% (3/123=.024).

CTR is important for determining a number of things:

1. If you are using Google AdWords, the higher CTR you have, the lower your cost-per-click becomes
2. How relevant your ad creative is to the keywords and key phrases you are bidding on
3. Whether you need to adjust your bid amount for positioning to achieve a higher CTR

With this said, it is possible to have low CTRs but high conversion rates. This can be the case if the keywords and key phrases you are bidding on are broad, but your ad is very specific, which makes the visitors who click on your ad more targeted.

Conversion Rate - Your conversion rate is also a very important measurement, as you want to constantly analyze and tweak your campaigns to achieve higher and higher conversion rates. The higher your conversion rate, the lower the cost per sale.

Conversion rate is figured by taking the number of sales, or leads, or sign-ups, what ever your conversion goal is, divided by the number of visits to your landing page sent by your PPC campaign.

As an example, if the conversion goal of your PPC campaign is to obtain a lead via a lead form submission, and you receive 105 leads from 2,100 visitors, your conversion rate is 5% (105/2100=.05).

There are many more measurements to be covered in a future post, but get a grasp on these for now, as they are a crucial part of understanding how successful your PPC campaign is.

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Tags: campaigns, click through rate, conversion rate, ctr, minternet marketing, Pay Per Click, Pay-Per-Click (PPC), PPC, return on investment, roi

How to Start a Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Program Part 2

In part one of “How to start a pay-per-click program”, I discussed the first 5 steps to take in your PPC campaign, which included setting goals, determining your budget, creating your landing page, choosing your ppc program, and choosing keywords and key phrases. I will talk about the next 5 steps to creating a successful ppc campaign in this post.

1. Determine the Goals and Objectives of your PPC campaign
2. Determine your budget
3. Create a landing page
4. Choose a PPC network
5. Research keywords and key phrases
6. Create the ads you will use
7. Turn your ads on
8. Measure your success
9. Revisit, and make one change to your campaign
10. Repeat steps 8 and 9

Creating your PPC ads

After you have your landing pages set up, the next step is to create the ads or creatives that will be shown for your PPC campaign. When writing creative copy, you have limited space, so getting straight to the point of your ad, and setting the expectation of what the user will see when a visitor clicks on your ad is key. You want to have a clear call to action in your ad, as well as matching the text in your ad to the text on the landing page. It is proven that higher conversion rates come from relative ad copy to the landing page. Don’t try to fool your visitors into clicking on your ad, then sending them to something they aren’t even looking for. This is a quick way to get your visitors to bounce, as well as deplete your budget.

Turn Your Ads On

Now it’s time to turn your ads on, and start getting traffic to your pages. In Google, as well as other PPC programs, you have the ability to turn your ads on to run 24/7 or to set certain timeframes. In addition, you can choose to run your ads evenly spread out throughout the day, or run ads until they budget is reached, which will show you how quickly your budget can be reached. There are many strategies to dayparting your ads, which is running your ads from, for instance, 12pm-4pm. These are some of the adjustments you may want to make after testing your ads, and measuring when you receive the best-converting traffic.

Measure Your Success

After your ads are running, you need to measure your success. There are a few ways to measure. One of the first measures is your click-through-rate or CTR. Your CTR is figured by dividing the number of clicks by the number impressions you receive. Here is an example: 476 impressions and 8 clicks would be a CTR of 1.7% (8/476=.0168).

Along with click-through-rate, or CTR, conversion rate is figured by taking the number of conversions, (you determine what a conversion is, this could be a lead, sale, or sign-up) and dividing it by the number of clicks you received. For instance, if you received 2 conversions out of 8 clicks, your conversion rate would be 25% (2/8=.25).

You also will want to see how much a conversion is costing you at these rates. To do this, you need to take your total spend for the clicks you received divided by the number of conversions, and this will give you your cost per conversion. For instance, if you spend $18 for 8 clicks, which led to 2 conversions, your cost per conversion would be $9.00 ($18/2).

By measuring the success of your PPC campaign, you will see how close you are to your budget for each conversion, and then adjust your campaign accordingly to get the biggest bang for your buck.

Revisit and Make One Change to Your Campaign

After you have measured the success of your campaign, try making a change to your creative or landing page. It is best to make only one change at a time, so that you can determine which changes result in either higher CTR on your creative, or higher conversion. The smallest changes can make a huge difference in your click-through, and conversion rates. You will want to constantly tweak your ppc campaign in order to get the best ROI. Some changes you can make are: changing the ad title, changing the headline on your landing page, changing the positioning of the form on your landing page, changing your bid amount for keywords, adding keywords, and negative keywords, changing your schedule of showing your ads (dayparting). There is no magic formula to a successful PPC campaign, the key is to constantly try to improve your CTRs, conversion rates, and drive your costs down as low as you can get them.

Repeat Steps 8 and 9

As I said earlier, you must constantly keep an eye on your campaigns, and determine what changes increase your bottom line. If your changes make your CTR or conversion rate lower, revert the change back, and make another tweak somewhere else. Whatever you do, don’t just set your campaign and go. You should also plan on a certain amount of your budget to be “test” money, as the first shot out isn’t usually going to give you exactly the results you are looking for unless you are very lucky. Managing a PPC campaign can be very time consuming, and changes must be able to be made very quickly to minimize losing too much money without results. If you find that you do not have the time to constantly keep your campaigns updated, test, and refresh, you may want to consider hiring an internet marketing professional. A professional can make adjustments to your ads, budgets, keywords and landing pages that they have learned through trials of past campaigns, and can dedicate the attention needed so you won’t give up on your PPC campaign before it has a chance to gain momentum.

Tags: ctr, how to, internet marketing professional, Pay Per Click, Pay-Per-Click (PPC), ppc campaign, roi, successful ppc, Uncategorized

Pay-Per-Click campaigns are an immediate source of traffic to your Web site or blog, and can potentially be a crucial part of your marketing success. Before you jump in head first, though, I would like to provide a guide on how to go about starting a PPC program.

1. Determine the Goals and Objectives of your PPC campaign
2. Determine your budget
3. Create a landing page
4. Choose a PPC network
5. Research keywords and key phrases
6. Create the ads you will use
7. Turn your ads on
8. Measure your success
9. Revisit, and make one change to your campaign
10. Repeat steps 8 and 9

Determine the Goals and Objectives of your PPC campaign

This obvious, yet crucial step is necessary to determine the success of your campaign. Typically, the major objectives are:

1. To make a sale
2. To obtain a lead
3. To get a phone call or visit to your business
4. To brand your company, blog, Web site
5. To make money from your Web site through affiliate programs, etc.

If you take the “I’ll just get traffic, and see what happens” approach, you do not have clearly defined or measurable goals. Some of the above objectives are easier to measure than others, but success in anything has some sort of relative measurement, So, determine what your goal is, and make future changes accordingly.

Determine Your Budget

This step is a bit like taking a trip to Vegas. Take as much as you can afford to lose. The first time you start a PPC campaign, you need to realize that just because you are paying for clicks does not guarantee anything. You must be able to afford to lose money for a short time, until you are able to measure, analyze, and adjust your campaign until you reach scalable metrics.

Create a Landing Page

This is yet another crucial step that you should not ignore. A landing page is the page that your visitors will reach when they click on your ad. The landing page should include a means to your end goal or objective. For instance, if your objective is to make a sale, your landing page should include the product(s) you wish to sell, a clear call-to-action, and a quick and easy way to make a purchase. If you want to acquire a lead, you must present a need or desire that will be fulfilled by the user submitting their information, and a form that is either on the page or maximum 1 click away, and is as simple as you can possibly make it. I will explain more about landing pages in a later post, as this is another topic that can be greatly expanded upon, but the poing of creating a landing page is to send your visitors directly to what they were looking for when they typed in a search term, and then clicked on your ad.

Choose a PPC network

There are many PPC networks to choose from, but to start, choosing one of major search engines is your best bet, as you will get the best measurement of success, more volume, and higher-quality clicks. If you haven’t already heard, the top 3 are Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, and Microsoft adCenter. You can typically find deals for signing up, like free credits.

Research Search Terms

Once you sign up with your provider, you will be able to use their built-in keyword tools to find keywords to add to your campaign. You want to choose the most relevant terms for your campaign, and determine how popular your search terms are. You can also do this without opening an account by using some of the free keyword research tools, such as Yahoo’s keyword suggestion tool or Google’s free keyword tool. There are also many great programs out there like WordTracker and Web CEO. Use these tools by entering some of the key phrases in your landing page. For instance, this blog is about PPC campaigns, so I would type that in, and the tool will give you other suggestions, and an average number of searches you can expect. This helps to broaden your keyword base, but getting too broad will result in non-relevant clicks to your site, which have less potential to create conversions. Try different combinations of keywords and key phrases, and measure which ones give you the best conversions.

This is the conclusion of “How to Start a Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Part 1″. Check back or better yet, subscribe to this blog for Part 2. In the meantime, start on these first steps, get your goals set, and do your research. If you have any questions or comments, please let me know your thoughts. Happy marketing!

Undergoing MyBlogLog Verification

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If you are looking to start a pay-per-click campaign as a part of your internet marketing plan, these resources will help you get off to a great start. The first three are the main 3 networks (first-tier, tier A).

Google AdWords

This is the most popular network for online advertising, although cost-per-click is usually much higher.

Yahoo! Search Marketing

Yahoo! Sponsored Search connects businesses and customers online. Sign up and get a $25 credit.

Microsoft AdCenter

Advertising on AdCenter network seems to have lower volume, but I have experienced higher conversion rates. The cost-per-click for keywords tends to be cheaper than Google or Yahoo.

Tier 2 Networks:

Enhance Interactive

Pay-per-click traffic for only $0.03 per click. Enhance Interactive knows your needs. Signup today and get $25 in Free Clicks!

Miva

Get $25 Bonus Pay-Per-Click Ad Credits.Click here.

Search123

Extend your reach with Search 123.

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If you are looking to start a pay-per-click campaign as a part of your internet marketing plan, these resources will help you get off to a great start. The first three are the main 3 networks (first-tier, tier A).

Google AdWords

This is the most popular network for online advertising, although cost-per-click is usually much higher.

Yahoo! Search Marketing

Yahoo! Sponsored Search connects businesses and customers online. Sign up and get a $25 credit.

Microsoft AdCenter

Advertising on AdCenter network seems to have lower volume, but I have experienced higher conversion rates. The cost-per-click for keywords tends to be cheaper than Google or Yahoo.

Tier 2 Networks:

Enhance Interactive

Pay-per-click traffic for only $0.03 per click. Enhance Interactive knows your needs. Signup today and get $25 in Free Clicks!

Miva

Get $25 Bonus Pay-Per-Click Ad Credits.Click here.

Search123

Extend your reach with Search 123.

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Compete.com

Brand new must have SEO / SEM tool. Experts raving, Drive traffic today!
Compete.com is the starting point to build and optimize search marketing campaigns that create brand awareness, drive site traffic and increase sales.

Web CEO

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If you are a using blogging as part of your internet marketing strategy (and you are crazy if you are not), it is a good idea to sign up for the top Social Networking sites. By signing up for these, and submitting your blog, you can quickly spread the word about the topic you are posting, and will attract the search engines to you almost immediately. Enjoy!

1. Technorati
2. Digg
3. Reddit
4. StumbleUpon
5. Blog Catalog
6. Furl
7. Del.icio.us
8. Newsvine
9. Squidoo
10. LinkedIn

Was this List Helpful to You?

Do you use these social media sites? Are there more that you use or that are your favorites? Let us know.

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Tags: affiliate programs, Blog Catalog, community members, Delicious, desired outcome, Digg, email marketing, Furl, gears, glossary of terms, Google, great resources, holistic approach, Internet marketing, internet resources, internet strategy, LinkedIn, Marketing, marketing campaign, marketing directory, marketing email, marketing optimization, marketing plan, marketing viral, MSN, Newsvine, online, online marketing, optimization seo, organic, Pay Per Click, PPC, ppc programs, ppc search engine, Reddit, return visitors, Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, search engines, search optimization, SEM, SEO, SMM, social marketing, Social Media Marketing, social networking sites, Squidoo, StumbleUpon, Technorati, top social networking sites, viral marketing, web, web marketing, web property, web site listings, web site optimization, website, Yahoo, yahoo search marketing

If you are trying to learn more about Internet Marketing, is important to learn the key terms used in the Internet marketing Industry. This glossary will be updated and added to often, so be sure to bookmark it and check back for more!

Affiliate Marketing - A marketing tactic in which you pay a partner on a performance basis, who hosts a link or banner ad on their website to yours. There are several pay-for-performance models, but the most popular are pay-per-sale, and pay-per-lead.

Organic Lisitngs or Organic Results -Web site listings that appear in the search engines “naturally”, meaning the search engines found and indexed the pages by crawling through your code and content, not by a purchased ad campaign.

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) - An online marketing model in which the advertiser pays an ad server for each time the advertisers ad is clicked, bringing visitors to their website. The most popular PPC programs are through the search engine programs, Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing, and MSN Adcenter.

Pay-Per-Sale - An online marketing model in which the advertiser pays the referring Web site for each sale that was sent from their site. The typical Pay-Per-Sale modal is usually done through Affiliate programs such as Commission Junction and LinkShare.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) - The practice of improving the friendliness of your Web site or web pages for the search engines in order to achieve higher search engine ranking positions (SERPs). SEO includes ensuring the coding, linking, structure, and content of your site are able to be spidered and indexed by the search engines.

Social Media Marketing (SMM) - An online marketing strategy that includes utilizing Blogs, Forums, Wikis, and Social Networking sites to drive popularity of your Webs ite, and in turn, more visitors through users interacting with your Web site, by bookmarking, adding comments, and forwarding to other community members.

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