Pay-Per-Click – Is Your Landing Page Working for You?
Posted by: Adriana Post date: March 10th, 2010
Without a doubt after the click-through, the landing page is one of the most important pieces of your PPC puzzle. If you convinced the searcher to click on your link, but fail to deliver what you promised in the ad on your landing page, you spent that money in vain.
Let’s look at some ads and their corresponding pages, and see if they have the right landing page. Let’s say I was searching for “mickey mouse toaster” (would you believe 6,600 people search for these monthly?), and here is the first PPC ad:
The ad looks good, though if it was me, I’d make it more specific. Once you click on that it takes you to this page (BTW, don’t worry, I copied the link, I didn’t click through from the ad):
WOW! Do you see a Mickey toaster there? I don’t! And I think the conversion rate on this ad is minimal. BTW, I don’t know if you can see this, but the ad was linked to a page that has the search results for “Mickey essentials”: nothing to do with toasters.
The second PPC ad is this:
And the corresponding landing page is this:
While I see a Mickey toaster, I also see a lot of other stuff going on that page. Of course, if you are the merchant, you are probably benefiting in other ways from your PPC campaigns (branding for example), even if you are not making a sale on that specific page. But if you are an affiliate marketer, you want every penny to count, to give you back a sale.
Here is how my landing page would look like, if I was trying to sell Mickey Mouse Toasters ( I did this quickly in less than 10 minutes in my Front Page program). My landing page is simple and to the point.
Are your landing pages cluttered and hard to navigate? Is your advertised product lost in that clutter, wasting you money? Take a few minutes and check your landing pages: make sure they deliver what you promised ion your ad, and that the potential buyer doesn’t have a hard time knowing how to buy the product.
PPC Challenge Update
Posted by: Adriana Post date: March 8th, 2010
As promised in my original post about this PPC challenge, this is an update on what I’ve been doing to meet my challenge goals.
Just as a reminder, I am shooting for 50 PPC campaigns before March is over: that means 2 campaigns a day, 5 days a week, and this past week, I haven’t met that goal. I did 7 campaigns:
- 1 to a landing page (I purchased some domains a while ago for specific products, and never did anything with them, so built one small site and I am directing some traffic to it with PPC). This page is monetized with a specific product from Amazon.com
- 1 direct to a merchant on CJ
- 5 direct to merchants on SAS
My ads are getting too many impressions, and not so many clicks, which makes for a very low CTR (see image above). That’s not good, and it means I probably have to tweak my ads.
Here are my starts as of now:
Impressions: 19,427
Clicks: 96
CTR: 0.49%
Cost: $34.52
Commission: $61.18
Profit: $26.66
This week, I need to get more serious, and start even more campaigns, as next Sunday I’ll be heading to Jamaica for a few days, and the following week I won’t be adding any campaigns.
I’ll let you know how I am doing next week.
If you’d like to join me and others in this challenge, there is still time: check out Matt’s Campaigns blast report before you get started: it will save you from making many mistakes.
Free Niche Research: Trucks
Posted by: Adriana Post date: March 5th, 2010
A few weeks ago I did some research for the truck accessories niche, but realized there is so much more to this niche, so I decided to go wider.
If you are an AdSense publisher, you’ll love the Trucks Niche: awesome payouts!
| Top 10 Highest Paying Keywords(from the Google keyword tool)
commercial truck insurance $12.34 Chevy trucks $8.09 semi trucks for sale $7.62 truck rental $7.40 used peterbilt trucks $6.98 moving truck $6.18 bucket trucks $5.87 bucket trucks for sale $5.78 used semi trucks $5.73 commercial truck sales $5.56 Bonus commercial truck for sale $5.45 commercial truck used $4.58 |
Top 10 Most Searched Keywords(all phrases are exact matches in Google)
truck trader 135,000 used trucks 135,000 Chevy trucks 110,000 dump truck 110,000 truck accessories 90,500 truck rental 74,000 trucks for sale 74,000 bucket truck 60,500 truck paper 60,500 classic trucks 49,500 Bonus truck parts 49,500 garbage truck 12,100 |
Resources
Truck forums will be one of the best resources for both content ideas and (if you get involved) traffic.
Also, if you know a truck driver, take him out to dinner once in a while and pick his brain. That type of information will be invaluable.
Possible Affiliate Programs
Yes, Amazon.com has offers for this niche too: truck accessories, truck tool box
CJ.com & Shareasale.com have some great programs as well.
Monetization Suggestions
AdSense is amazing for this niche. If you like to learn more about the niche, or if you just love trucks, you may just hit gold!
Of course, intertwine affiliate offers in your content, as well as in the sidebar of your site. you can also create specific pages for commonly used/needed items for truckers.
Here are some domains available for this niche at this time:
UsedDumpTrucks.biz & .info get 18,100 exact searches a month.
CheapTrucksForSale.org & .biz get 9,900 exact searches a month.
ClassicTrucksForSale.biz & .info with 6,600 exact searches a month.
MilitaryTrucksForSale.net, .org, biz & .info, with 3,600 exact searches monthly.
AftermarketTruckParts.biz & .info have 4,400 exact searches a month.
CommercialTruckTrader.biz & .info, with 12,100 exact searches mothly
TruckTraderOnline.org, .biz & .info, with 12,100 exact searches a moth.
There is a lot more research that can be done for this niche, digging deep into it to find long tail keywords and phrases. Let me know if you need help.
Pay Per Click Basics
Posted by: Adriana Post date: March 4th, 2010
Pay Per Click or PPC is a way to advertise to a specific group of people who are searching for your information using keywords or a keyword phrase. It’s called Pay Per Click because you, as a business owner, only pay for the advertisement when someone clicks on it.
The clicks are good because they’re clicking on your URL and heading on over to your website where you can close the sale and make a profit.
There are different PPC programs through various search engines and companies however the most popular PPC service is Google AdWords.
It’s free to participate in AdWords however, before you to sign up there are a few questions you’ll want to answer including:
1. How many people are looking for your products or services? Keyword tools will help you find this information and it’s key to creating an effective PPC campaign.
2. How much will your click’s cost? Google’s traffic estimator will tell you how much it’ll cost you each time someone clicks on your ad. This is important because you can quickly spend thousands of dollars and if that’s not in your budget you need to design your campaign carefully.
3. Who are your competitors? Using Google, search for your keywords and pay attention to the ads that pop up in the right hand column of your search results. These are your competition. Study them carefully. Scan through the first couple of pages. When you see an ad that’s a repeat, you’ve gone through your competition. If there are more than 50 ads, you may want to reconsider a PPC campaign with those keywords.
Setting Up Your First Ad
Once you’ve determined the keywords you want to include in your ad, it’s time to write your first PPC ad. AdWords has a strict character limit. You get 25 keywords for your headline, 35 each for the next two lines of text, and then your URL. This means it’s time to get creative. You want a headline that captures attention and hopefully promises a benefit and then two sentences that inspire curiosity, evoke emotion, and motivate clicks through to your website.
Each PPC ad you create will be optimized for very specific keywords and should thus send readers to a relevant web page. If, for example, you have a PPC ad selling a dog training eBook and people who click through land on a page that sells dog care information you’re not going to have the same conversion rate as if you sent them directly to a sales page for that dog training eBook.
Once your ad is written, the rest is easy. Simply log onto or create your Google AdWords account and follow the steps. Set your budget low (you can always adjust it), create your ad, enter your billing information and you’re good to go. Oh, one final thing. Track the success of your PPC ads. You can fine tune them for optimal results, delete them and start over or add to your campaign.
March PPC Challenge
Posted by: Adriana Post date: March 2nd, 2010
This month I am participating in Matt Levenhagen’s Blast Challenge 11. What is that, you may ask? Every few months, Matt challenges the members of his campaign blasts forum to challenge themselves and do 100 PPC blasts/campaigns in a span of 5 weeks.
It’s an intense 5 weeks, but the results are usually incredible. As a matter of fact, the very first blast challenge I participated in helped me find my first wildly successful PPC campaign, and I only did about 10 campaigns, not 100. Here is a snapshot of that campaign:
This month my challenge is to do 50 PPC campaigns (even though I participate in Matt’s challenges, I am in the group that only do what we can). I’ve never done 50 campaigns in a month: my highest was 35 I think.
So, here is what I will do: every Monday for the duration of this challenge, I’ll post my progress here: how many PPC campaigns I did so far, what network I used (CJ, SAS, etc.), if my campaigns are direct to merchant or to landing pages, and my results for that week.
I’ll also concentrate a lot of my blog posts on how to succeed with pay per click this month.
I hope you’ll follow along with me, and if you’d like to try a campaign blast of your own, try out Matt’s blast guide and forum: there are no contracts, and the knowledge you’ll gain from doing a blast challenge may change your life. Come on: join me!
