Glend Article

Mini Sites for PPC are dead

Tuesday, January 15th, 2008

I was recently taking stock of my current inventory of made for PPC sites. I looked at old sites, what we are currently working on, and what we have planned for the future. As far as sites created for the sole purpose of capturing PPC traffic to affiliate offers, I can honestly say the mini-sites we know and love are dead.

History

First a little PPC history. In 2005 and before you actually could slap up a single page landing page and do well with PPC to affiliate offers. Then when quality score started really developing and being enforced in early 2006, everyone started making the typical 5 page mini site with an article page, contact page, about page, privacy policy, and site map. These “mini-sites” as we called them we basically just an attempt to boost quality scores. They worked great for a while too. The problem is, they don’t work anymore. Google, and now even Yahoo and MSN can see right through these sites. Based on the quality scores they are assigning to t.... Read More

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Landing page or redirect - that is the question

Tuesday, January 8th, 2008

Should I use a landing page or a redirect?

It’s a question often asked on forums for new affiliates. But it is still a question that even the most experienced affiliate struggles with. On one hand, going direct to the offer eliminates the extra click required for the customer to reach the offer, which may be losing 60% of your customers. On the other hand, pre-selling the offer may increase the final conversion rate. That’s assuming you can even get away with going direct to the offer from your PPC engine. Like almost every topic in affiliate marketing, there is no right answer. It depends on tons of different factors, but most notably the offer, and the traffic source. So in general terms let’s explore these 2 factors.

The offer:

The main question for me is, would this offer benefit from pre-selling on a landing page? If so, is that benefit great enough to outweigh the extra click required to get to the offer? Say your landi.... Read More

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Whats your landing page bounce rate?

Saturday, December 15th, 2007

One of the best ways to test the effectiveness of you landing pages is through Google Analytics Bounce Rate metric. This particular report can be found under content optimization, navigational analysis, entrance page bounce rates. With a bit of tweaking you can view a chart like this:

So what does this show? Well, like in golf, a lower number is better here. The lower the percentage, the more people are clicking through your landing page and taking the action you want them to. The higher the percentage, the more people are abandoning your landing page. In the example above, the landing page with the 46.3% rate is the most effective page, while the 76.5% page is pretty bad. This is a tremendously important way to gauge the effectiveness of your landing pages.

It’s also import because it gives you an even more detailed view than just.... Read More

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Good and bad landing page examples

Thursday, November 15th, 2007

Its always a good idea to check out your competitors landing pages to see what everyone is doing. The best way to stay current on the trends is to just browse ads in a certain niche. I was checking some of the ads on the first page Google results for the keyword”mortgage” the other day. You’d figure with such a competitive term and high dollar industry, these people would have the absolute best landing page. That is not always the case. Here’s an example of what I would consider 1 bad and 1 good landing page.

The bad:

This page is cluttered, unfocused, and leaves no clear call to action. There are a million links on the page to all the various lending programs, leaving the customer confused as what to do next. Although, it might get customers into the company’s sales funnel, I would assume this is a very low converting page.

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Create landing pages based on keyword intent

Wednesday, August 15th, 2007

If you have found a campaign and offer that is converting well, you probably are already running customized landing pages based on the keyword used. For example is someone searches for “carbon fiber golf clubs” you have the word “carbon fiber golf clubs” on the landing page. You probably grab the search term and display it on your page with PHP. Pretty common sense stuff. But I like to take it one step further to squeeze a higher conversion percentage from my landing pages. It’s all about choosing the type of landing page based on the intent of the keyword. Certain keywords are used by searchers at different buying stages of the buying cycle. So you don’t want to send someone looking for general information to the same landing pages as someone ready to buy. To determine what type of landing page would be best, you need to determine the web searchers intent for term they typed in.

It’s probably best described with .... Read More

Tags: Landing Pages
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