Tag: PPC
We’ve established in the last post (Do You Have Dedicated Landing Pages for Your PPC?) that landing pages are vital if you want to get the most from your Pay Per Click (PPC) campaigns such as Google AdWords. They are the key to converting visitors onsite – getting visitors to complete the actions you want them to.
If created well, landing pages can be used to make a ‘hard sell’. Not in a hammy, used car salesman way, but in the sense that you have visitors where you want them. Show them what they need to see, present the information with a focused message and hit them with some strong call to actions – remember we talked about your goals in the previous post? Landing pages allow you to create a pre-planned funnel/path, pushing visitors to complete those goals.
How do you create good call to actions, and how do you get people to do what you want? Well there’s no secret recipe I’m afraid. It’s a case of trial and error – test your landing pages and constantly tweak and amend them based on the results you get.
Here are the main things you need to be aware of when creating landing pages:
- Colourful, big and bold buttons: Hit them with a call to action in a visually appealling way with good quality buttons that tell them to ‘Buy Now’, ‘Sign up for our newsletter’, ‘Take a Free Trial Today’, ‘Download Now’ etc.. Make these buttons stand out from your page through the use of colour and good quality design
- Limit the use of links and menu options on the landing page: The more links on your landing page, the more likely people will click off elsewhere, get distracted and never complete the action you want them to
- Clever content layout: People scan webpages, they don’t read them (this goes back to the ‘lazy, demanding and impatient’ bit I mentioned in the previous post!). So make it easy for them to get the key information – use bullet points, short paragraphs, bold text and colour
- Make it easy for visitors to complete the goal: If your goal is to have them contact you, make the contact form small and simple. Do you really need their full address, date of birth and favourite colour? Think about the minimum amount of information you need in order to follow up that lead and only request that. If you’re trying to get them to make a purchase, don’t make them go through hoops. Display your delivery details and return policy clearly to instill a feeling of trust, and make sure you let them know that your online payment process is secure. Don’t give them any reason to start clicking about off the path you’re directing them down
- Make sure the key information is above the fold: This goes back to newspapers – when they’re delivered or displayed in newsagents, you can see the top half of the front page – this is where they put all their major stories and headlines. The same goes for landing pages – make sure your most important information is towards the top of your landing page – above the fold. Anything people have to scroll down to view is below the fold. Remember that people have different monitor sizes too, so what may be above the fold for you, may not be above the fold for all your visitors. Why is this important? Again, people are lazy, demanding and impatient and can’t be bothered to scroll down the page to find the information they want! If they view the content above the fold and it looks relevant to their query, then they may make the effort to scroll. But if not… bang goes the back button!
- Remember that not everyone will convert: Not all visitors will be in the position to buy the item they’re searching for (or contact you for the service your offer). They could just be in the research stage of the purchase process. Do you have anything you can give them? If you can’t fulfil your primary goal of a sale, what secondary goals do you have. Can you get that visitor to sign up to your newsletter, or can they download a guide with advice on the purchasing process (possibly via a form to capture their details)? It’s important to try and make the most of each click, and understanding that not everyone will convert is important. Give people more than one option – so create more than one call to action on your landing page.
If you have any other landing page tips, leave them in the comments below. Have you tried something that had amazing results? Share it with us.
March 8, 2010
Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising is now one of the fastest growing forms of advertising. Most of you will be familar with Google AdWords – you bid on particular keywords, create adverts relating to those keywords, set a maximum amount you want to pay for each click on that ad for that keyword – and bingo! Lots of high quality traffic heading your way (as long as you’re bidding on the right terms and have a budget that allows for more than one click a day!).
PPC advertising, especially Google AdWords are a fantastic way of increasing the volume of traffic to your site. Many types of websites and businesses will benefit from PPC:
- If you have a new site which is not yet ranking well in the search engines
- If you’re in a very competitive market and don’t really stand a chance for ranking on your key terms
- If you haven’t got any optimisation on your site, so probably won’t rank for your desired terms
PPC is a great way of getting traffic to your site, but that’s only half the battle. Once someone clicks on your advert and lands on your website, what happens then? You need to carefully think about what your goal is for that visitor:
- Signing up for your newsletter
- Making a purchase
- Registering for an event
- Making contact via your ‘Contact Us’ form
Once you know what your goal is, you then have to think about how you’ll achieve that goal. This is where landing pages come in. A landing page, simply put, is the page that visitors ‘land’ on when they first enter your site. With PPC you have control over this (whereas in natural search it’s most likely to be your homepage, however other pages will rank also, but unless you’ve optimised a particular page for a specific phrase, it’s unlikely you’ll have much control over this).
Anyway, back to PPC where you can specify the landing page you want your visitors to land on. So what is the best page on your site to direct them to? You may think that your homepage is the best page – let the visitor click about and go to the content they want to see. But that’s where you’re wrong. The Internet has made us all lazy, demanding and impatient! We don’t want to have to search your site for the information we’re looking for – we want it presented to us straight away!
For example, if you’re selling bikes and have an advert running for the keyphrase ‘Ladies red bike’, when a searcher enters that term into the search box, they’ll get a list of natural and paid results. If they click on your advert…
Ladies Red Bike
Wide Range Of Bikes For
Ladies Who Like To Ride
www.yoursite.com
…where will they land? Do they land on your page featuring all your ladies red bikes, or do they land on your homepage? What makes more sense to you? If they can’t see immediately what they’re looking for, they’ll hit that dreaded ‘back’ button and click on another advert, and you’ve just been charged for a click with no result.
So it’s important that you direct people to landing pages that are relative to their search query.
Come back on Monday to find out what our top tips are for creating landing pages with conversions in mind; getting people to take the action you want. The more conversions you get, the better return on investment you’ll get from your PPC campaign.
In the meantime, if you’ve had any success using landing pages in your PPC campaign, leave a note in the comments telling us abou it! And remember, SMEketing are dab hands at creating high quality landing pages. If you’d like us to overhaul your PPC campaign and help you get more conversions, get in touch with us on 023 8083 7271 or email us on info@SMEketing.com.
March 4, 2010
You can’t miss the doom and gloom of the current economic climate. All businesses, large and small, must carefully spend their marketing budget. Gone are the days of frivolous spending. So I wanted to outline five cost effective ways of spending your small business marketing budget. With online marketing become more and more vital as part of a small business marketing plan, there are many ways which small businesses can promote their business and help drive leads.
1. Blogging: Setting up a blog can be completely free! Yes, we love anything free. But like most freebies, in order for it to be effective you need to plan it well and invest your time into it. Using free blog providers like Wordpress and Google Blogger are great ways of getting involved in the blogging world, without costing you a penny. There are so many different benefits of blogging, one of the biggest benefits is to your websites ranking in the search engines (aka Search Engine Optimisation - SEO): Google loves new and unique content. Blogging is a great way to constantly add new content to your site. Plus your posts will be tagged and full of relevant keyword. Blog well and others in your industry may link to you, increasing the number of valuable inbound links. For more on the benefits of blogging, read this post: Blogging – just for teenagers, or good for your small business?
2. Twitter: Again, another freebie! Twitter is great for promoting what you do and learning about latest industry trends. By joining the conversation and providing useful information, you will soon generate a loyal base of followers. Use Twitter to answer questions relevant to your industry, learn about new goings on, promote your product, events and news (but don’t be pushy). For more information on using Twitter to promote your small business, read these blog posts: Twitter: Small Business Success Stories – Will yours be one of them? and Guide to Getting Your Small Business Started on Twitter
3. Email Marketing: Email marketing can cost as little as 1p per recipient and £5 per mailshot (well, those are the rates for using a self managed SMEketing Email Marketing solution, but we like to think these are pretty competitive!). If you don’t have time to maintain a close working relationship with your customer base, email marketing is a great, cost effective way of keeping them updated with your latest news, products and offers. Email marketing can also be used as a lead generation tool. Send out well targeted mailshots to relevant recipients and you will find visits to your web site go up, and conversion rates increase. For more information on the benefits of email marketing read this blog post: Email Marketing for Small Businesses
4. Google AdWords: These unfortunately are not free (we wish!), but you completely control your budget. If you only have £10 a day to spend, that’s fine! Make sure you get the most from your budget by using relevant keywords, focused adverts with a strong call to action, and a well thought-through landing page. Google AdWords can be a great way of driving relevant traffic to your site, and the results are completely measurable. If something isn’t working, you know straight away. This is why AdWords are one of the most cost effective advertising mediums out there. Add Conversion Tracking to your adverts and you’ll be able to see exactly what ad’s are providing the highest conversion rate once visitors are on your site. Once you know that, you can direct your budget to keywords and adverts that are giving you the highest Return on Investment (ROI).
5. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO): You know I said Google AdWords weren’t free, well there is a way that you can get Google to promote your site FOR FREE! How? Improve your website’s ranking for relevant keywords, and Google will display your site in their search results – free of charge! But again, this is something that will take an investment in your time. Make sure your website is well designed – good navigation, lots of keyword rich content, no broken links, good use of anchor text in your links, etc… Once that is done, you need to boost the number of high quality inbound links. Go to Yahoo and type “linkdomain:yourcompany.com -site:yourcompany.com” to see the number of your inbound links. Do the same for your competitors and see how you compare. Next create a plan to increase the number of incoming links – sign up to relevant directories, promote your blog, create great content on your site that people want to link to. Links should be from high quality sites – link farms are NOT GOOD! The page giving you a link should have few other outgoing links on the same page, and the anchor text should be optimised to promote what you do, not necessarily your business name. An example of a good link to SMEketing would be: “SMEketing is a fantastic source for small business marketing advice and services.” The anchor text here tells Google that the link (www.SMEketing.com) is relevant to “small business marketing”. If the anchor text fell on the business name, it would just tell Google that “SMEketing” is relevant to www.SMEketing.com – which to be fair, it probably had figured out anyway!
Read here for more SEO tips: Top 10 SEO Mistakes Your Small Business Should Avoid
If you want to learn more about any of the above marketing strategies, please get in touch. At SMEketing we’re experienced in all these marketing mediums and have seen first hand the benefits when small businesses employ such tactics.
July 1, 2009
I’ve been very busy this week – visiting clients and prospects throught the South of England. I’ve been to Guildford, Portsmouth, Southampton and Eastleigh! So I’ve not had a chance to write a proper blog post. The aim of this blog is to provide educational content, to help small businesses understand the various marketing strategies they can use to help make their small business a success.
During my visits to clients and prospects this week, the importance of educating oneself has being hugely reinforced. Unfortunately, more than one person I’ve spoken to this week has told me about an unfortunate experience when outsourcing a marketing function to an marketing agency or consultant (not SMEketing though!!!). This is why it’s so important to educate yourself in the basics of what you want to outsource. If you want to employ a marketing agency or a marketing consultant to manage your search engine optimisation (SEO), Google Adword (PPC), or design a website, you must educate yourself on the foundation prinicples of these marketing activities. Only then are you in a position where you can question the marketing agency; for example, if you don’t know what is involved in creating and managing a small business website, how do you know if you’re being spun a yarn?
Another example is SEO; just type “SEO basics” into Google and millions of entries come up. Even 30 minutes spent browsing these articles is time well spent. That way, when you talk to your marketing agency, you will understand the jargon (although a good agency will not try to confuse you by using terms and jargon that you won’t understand). You’ll also know if the agency or marketing consultant is implementing unethical tactics – something which is vitally important, especially when dealing with SEO.
So this is the lesson for the week – educate, educate, educate. I’m not suggesting you go out and buy loads of books on various marketing strategies or spend hours crawling the internet for information. But by arming yourself with a basic level of knowledge, when you’re talking to an ‘expert’, you’ll be in a better position to decide if they are really an ‘expert’ at all. Outsourcing marketing activies can can be a vital part of your small business strategy, but it can become very expensive if you’re dealing with an agency or consultant who is willing to take your money and run because you don’t know better!
June 19, 2009
I was driving back to Southampton on the M3 the other day when I heard an interesting fact on the radio; did you know that 80% of research before purchase is done online. 88.14% of those searches are done using Google.
So if you’re running a small business, your website must be found on Google to have a chance of connecting these targeted, high quality visitors to your website.
There are two ways to get visitors from Google.
These two methods come under the term “Search Engine Marketing” or “Search Marketing.” Google Adwords is a way of sending high quality visitors to your website immediately, by paying for it. SEO will provide a stream of free, high quality visitors to your website but can take up to a while for the best results to come through.
Both types of search marketing can be used to ensure your website reaches the visitors that you want to connect with.
What is Google Adwords? Google Adwords allows you to place small text based advertisements of your website on Google. Here’s how it works: You create text ads and choose keywords you think your customers would use to find you. Those text ads are displayed when someone types in one of your keywords. You only pay when someone clicks on your ad’s link and visits your website.
What is SEO? SEO is a way of ensuring your website is accessible to Google and has the best chance to rank higher than other websites that offer similar products/services. The theory behind SEO is simple: Ensure your website follows the Google webmaster guidelines to make it accessible. Create a website that is the more relevant to what you are offering then your competitors. Think about the keywords your customers would use to find you and use those words in relevant places throughout your website. Make it a high quality website so that other websites will link to you. I recommend that if you have invested in SEO (and I always advise that you do) you should also run a Google Adwords campaign until your SEO results appear.
Ensuring that your website ranks high in the Google results is vital to receiving high quality and quantity leads. You need to make sure your small business website is working as hard for you, as you are for your small business.
Managing a SEO and PPC campaign takes time, patience and a thorough understanding of the process. If you want to take advantage of the benefits of these solutions, but just don’t have the time or skills, contact us at SMEketing. We have experience in running campaigns for a variety of organisation, all who are now reaping the rewards!
April 3, 2009
