Don't Be This Kid

Going into 2010 many businesses are looking at how they can improve their online marketing and many are considering Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising as one option. PPC is attractive because it offers the opportunity for immediate traffic (at a price) and the Return on Investment on a PPC Campaign is much easier to calculate than other online marketing methods.

Most businesses find that using an online marketing firm to manage PPC campaigns is a wise investment, however many come to this realization only after trying it for themselves. Therefore, I’d like to offer these suggestions to avoid PPC pitfalls that many encounter:

Irrelevance – The ad should direct the user to a relevant, appropriate page. For example, an advertisement for a sale on a Panasonic Model TC L37 S1 flat screen television should direct the user to a page that is focused on that product. Therefore, the advertisement should not send the user to a home page, or even a category page that discusses television sets in general. Overall, a landing page should be designed to be highly relevant to the searchers stated intent not only to overcome the quality hurdle imposed by the search engines, but also to convert visitors that do arrive on the page.

No Clear Call To Action – Many businesses become overly enamored with the design, advertising copy, snappy graphics and forget to clearly ask the user to take the desired action. Think big, red “Buy Now” button in the upper right-hand corner

Too Much Information – Advertisers often include extraneous information that confuses the user; this can include advertising copy, graphics, video and more.  The Landing Page should focus only on getting the user to take the desired action. This can include making a purchase, signing up for an email list or requesting more information.

Complexity – Use the KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid) method when designing Landing Pages. Start with a template that is consistent with the website’s existing look and feel.  If possible, remove the unnecessary navigation to avoid distraction. Write copy that is highly targeted and keyword-rich focused on a single topic. Finally, create a clear call to action. If several people shown the page for 3 seconds can answer the questions: What is this page about? and What is the next step? Then it should be ready to use.

Failure to Test – Many new PPC advertisers become engrossed in the design of their Landing pages and fail to test their new creation. Let’s be clear: we’re not talking about advanced A/B or Multivariate testing, we’re talking about simple functionality and appearance. Before committing hundreds or thousands of dollars in a PPC campaign, test the Landing Page to ensure that it works and appears as intended. You can save the advanced stuff for later.

PPC advertising can be a very effective method for driving targeted traffic to a website, however many new advertisers get burned by making some pretty simple mistakes. Hopefully, by avoiding these pitfalls, they can climb the learning curve quickly enough to avoid some expensive mistakes.

Do you have some Landing Page design horror stories? If so, please share them in the comments and tell us what you learned from them.

Bill Rowland

Living down the street, I’ve grown to know Rick Simmons through frequent early morning run-ins walking our respective pets. Rick anointed me as “The Mayor” of our neighborhood because I’m often caught speaking with someone in the neighborhood. Over time, we became friends and shared the details of our lives, occupations, spouses’ jobs etc…

One day Rick stopped by and said that I need to work for him.  After thinking about it for about 10 minutes, I said “let’s try it”.  I was always impressed with Rick’s general knowledge, but after I started to work with him I truly appreciated his level of marketing expertise, internet and otherwise. I was totally blown away!!!

Rick communicates with people really well and I’m excited about working with him. I especially enjoy watching his dynamic presentations. At one recent seminar, Rick easily translated all of the technical jargon of search engine marketing and social media tools into meaningful concepts that excited every attendee. I was so impressed, that I even mentioned my experience to a close friend. After meeting with Rick, she was impressed too;  she soon became a Dinkum client.

I guess the bottom line of my first post ever is – if you ever get a chance to meet Rick Simmons or have the opportunity to listen to him present, you won’t be sorry.  It is worth every penny!

Kelly Dunning

While we’re not sure of the “new” direction for Ask, whether or not Google has something to do with it (blended results maybe), it’s a shame to hear that the focus is gone from being a part of the big 4 towards a niche that is probably unnecessary. In any event, we will keep you posted on any future updates. The message here continues to be, keep focusing your SEO strategy on Google.

and wondered where that came from. That is, until I realized that my gmail was my StumbleUpon account and I have the StumbleUpon toolbar installed on my firefox browser. When I do the same without the toolbar, it doesn’t appear (sometimes I’m a little slow). It is a nice addition though.

This post however, raises awareness of a feature that appears suspiciously like StumbleUpon, that was created by Google around the same time that ebay purchased StumbleUpon (back in April I believe) called Dice.

Appearing on your Google toolbar (as dice icons), clicking it will take you to a site that Google recommends and appears to tie in with your search history. If you already have the toolbar click here to add this feature. It’s a little weak, certainly won’t have the StumbleUpon folks concerned and I won’t be switching any time soon. I have a feeling that Google will be adding more and more of these features before you know it.

The current system requires the user logging into their Google account and it doesn’t appear that it will affect regular results but I wonder if that’s in the back of their minds….if so, how would they tackle abuse of that system?

Rather than get ahead of myself, I like this experiment more from a personal perspective than an Internet marketers. iGoogle is my home page, I use Google docs, Gmail etc and would appreciate the ability to flag sites that I know are Adsense spam, junky or just plain useless. My only issue is, other than for marketing purposes, how often do I use the same keyword or keyword phrase to warrant the effort that I would put into making these customizations of my search results? If I don’t get the results that I want, I’ll use a different keyword phrase.

Personally I like that they’re always experimenting. I just don’t know if this is a real winner in my books. They might like to look towards a system like www.stumbleupon.com to bring a more social element to the personalized search results.

Click To Play

In addition to preparing and launching the video, this gave us another opportunity to distribute it online via the many video sharing websites out there. Included in this list is:

www.break.com
www.metacafe.com
www.dailymotion.com
www.brightcove.com
www.youtube.com
www.blip.tv
www.revver.com

In all, the distribution (manually) took approximately 1 and a half hours. For the sake of the experiment, we targeted the keyword phrase “seo with dinkum”. After only 1 week, we are looking at 146 references so those 21 websites that we submitted to has expanded to include blogs and even article websites (still not sure how we managed those) and many of them are now included in our list of incoming links according to our webmasters sitemap. Add to that the handful of referrals we’ve already received from these video sites and we have an interesting start. It was a fairly low-level experiment but given the time spent (and time available) thought it was worth sharing.

We’re looking to roll out something a little more viral in the coming months and of course we’ll revisit this little experiment again to see how things are going.