K.I.S.S.

Landing pages – the places on your site where people land after clicking on one of your sites links in the search engines – are often your first formal introduction to a new visitor to your website.  Landing pages can also have a huge impact on where you show up in natural and sponsored results on search engines like Google, Yahoo! Search, and Microsoft Live Search.

Landing pages can include your site’s homepage, but are usually pages within your website that are created specifically for people who click on links for your site that appear in sponsored or natural search results, and pertain to a specific offer, promotion or campaign.

Here at Yield Software, we often hear from our small and medium size business clients that they want better landing pages, but just don’t know what they can do given limited time and resources.  So, in an effort to be helpful, I’ve come up with a short list of six recommendations that will enable you to create simple, easy-to-implement landing pages for your small or growing business.

Step One: Ask the question “Who am I / what is my business?” One of the major mistakes small businesses make is that it is not crystal clear what product or service they provide.  These folks cloud their offerings in fancy acronyms meaningful to their employees but not their prospects.  Or they are overly general, saying things like “Leading provider of value added solutions.”  Find clarity about who you are and work on describing what you offer in the clearest language possible.  Avoid jargon, “inside the beltway” chatter and acronyms not universally known or understood.

Step Two: Establish the goal for your landing page. Are you trying to generate sales? Do you want to increase the uptake of a free trial?  Or is your landing page a lead generation tool?  Be sure you’re clear what you want from your landing page.  According to statistics, you only have about three seconds before the visitor hits the “back” button.  Having a clear goal will ensure you make the most of those precious seconds.

Step Three: Reinforce your keywords. If you don’t already have a keyword list – that is, a list of words or phrases people might naturally type into a search engine that most closely pertain to your own goods or services – make one now.  Make sure that the keywords you bid on are contained in your PPC ads and also in your natural search engine listings.  Then, be sure your keywords are naturally incorporated into the headlines and body copy of your landing page.  In other words, don’t just stuff a bunch of keywords randomly on the page – it’s got to make sense to any normal person who reads it.

Step Four:  Present an obvious call-to-action. When people do a search on Google or other leading search engines, they are almost always declaring an intention.  They’re looking for something.  If that something happens to be YOUR something, it’s best to give them an immediate next step to take when they arrive on your site.  So be sure there is a clear, obvious call-to-action that helps your visitor get what they’re looking for. Be sure it’s the first thing any normal person would notice when first scanning your landing page.

Step Five: Remember the old “K.I.S.S.” lesson (keep it simple, stupid!). You’ve heard it a thousand times before so don’t forget it now: less is more.  Keep your pages uncluttered and free from too many options.  This means one or two (smallish) graphics; no more than three bullets in a list; and avoiding dense copy blocks (for instance, line spacing at 1.5 or double).  When your visitors click on your links it is likely because they are looking for something very specific.  So address that need – and that need only.  If you must present options (small, medium, large, etc.), keep the presentation of those options very basic and easy-to-understand.

Step Six: Measure as much as you can. You can use free tools such as Google Analytics on your site to measure all sorts of user behaviors while folks are visiting your site.  You can also look at how many people click on your links, how many hit the “back” button, how many heed your call-to-action, and how many of those convert to a sale.  Why is this important?  This is information you can use to make your landing pages better and better over time.

More sophisticated Web marketers will go to the extra effort to personalize the landing page for each individual visitor to the extent possible.  Amazon.com and several other e-tailers are masters at this, and paying attention to how they do it can be very instructive.

But there’s time to get to the harder stuff a little later on.  Landing pages don’t have to be highly designed or super-sophisticated destinations that suck all your time and resources.  But they do have to be simple, focused, efficient and effective.  Following these six easy steps can help you toward these ends.

Small Plug: I would also like you to know that our Yield Web Marketing Suite includes powerful landing page optimization (LPO) tools that, when used in concert with a pay-per-click (PPC) ad campaign on the major search engines, can automatically test and optimize your landing pages so only the right pages are at work for you.  We’ve got a free 30-day trial, so there’s no cost to you to give it a try.

Go here for more information.

To see our blog post on LPO, go here.

To see our entire Web Marketing 101 blog series, go here.

ChaiSpice Cupcake, courtesy Just Desserts

Even You Can Write Great Ad Copy

A key stumbling block for many novice Web marketers is the task of writing compelling ad copy for a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign on Google’s AdSense, Yahoo’s Search Marketing or Microsoft’s adCenter. Web site owners and novice marketers who are not natural copywriters will find it difficult to zero in on the most right collection of words that inspire people to click on a link.

The good news? No one knows your site, your company or your products as well as you do.

Put that unique knowledge to work when following these few simple tips for creating excellent PPC campaign ad copy:

First, be sure you know the character limits for the advertising platform. Typically the title (the first line in the ad) is limited to 25 characters.  Ad copy, including the URL, is limited to 70 characters in most instances.

Second, when writing the title, be sure the keywords you’ve bid on are included. For instance, if you bid on the term “cupcakes”, that same word should be in your ad title.  The title is very often the most important element of the whole ad and will dramatically impact click-through rates (CTR).  Depending upon the ad platform, you can typically opt to dynamically place a keyword you’ve bid on into a standard headline (for instance, “cupcakes” OR “birthday cakes” OR “brownies” would automatically be inserted to a standard headlines such as: “<KEYWORD> baked fresh-to-order daily”).

Third, using clear, easy-to-understand language (i.e. whole sentences), briefly state what makes you different. If it’s the lowest prices, get that into the headline or body copy.  If you make your cupcakes using only fresh, organic ingredients, then say so! If you’ve won an award for customer service, crow about it.  No matter what business you’re in, it’s very likely you have competitors, so be sure to succinctly state: “this is what makes me different!”

One last piece of advice: writing effective PPC ad copy is inherently a trial-and-error process.  It’s best to try a number of ideas and see which perform best for you over time.  You’ll be amazed at how much you learn about your customers in the process.  All of which is to say: have patience.  Few people get this right on the first go.  Keep trying. Keep refining.  You’ll get the hang of it and before you know it, you’ll be a pro!

One more piece of advice that’s also a small plug: try Yield Software’s Web Marketing Suite. We’ve automated the whole process of PPC campaign management and provide a complete, easy and profitable way for you to test your ad copy and get at the results you’re looking for.  We have a free 30-day trial, so give us a try—nothing ventured, nothing gained, right?

(Oh: and about that cupcake… Just Desserts is a famous bakery and an old favorite of those of us who live in San Francisco — check them out online and order yourself some cupcakes!  It’ll help to inspire your copy writing, guaranteed.)

For more information on our Yield Web Marketing Suite, go here.

For more of our blog series on Web Marketing 101, go here.

Unlike outdoor advertising (i.e. billboards) or radio and television ads, where precise correlations to ROI can be elusive, search engine marketing (SEM) enables marketers to track interactions and behavior at every step of engagement.

Though a huge number of web marketing professionals employ display advertising on sites like NYTimes.com or FOXNews.com or Yahoo!, a growing share of marketing dollars are being directed to the search engines and specifically pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns.  By buying the “Sponsored Links” you see on search result pages on Google, Yahoo Search or Microsoft Live Search, marketers are able to track: (a) clicks on an ad link; (b) arrival at a website’s landing page; (c) what visitors do once on the site; and (d) whether or not that visitor converts to a paying customer, among many other possibilities.

Such tracking is typically achieved by using a third-party analytics package in your website.  Such packages range from free and easy-to-install (i.e., Google Analytics) to quite complex and powerful systems that are very expensive and time-consuming to implement.  If you’re a small or growing business, Google Analytics is a great tracking package that will give you much of what you need and is very easy to implement simply by following their detailed instructions.

Once a visitor converts to a paying customer, web marketers are able to do an ROI analysis on that particular individual and across all customers who similarly converted to paying customers from the same campaign.  By comparing the total amount spent to acquire customers through a web marketing campaign to the amount of revenue generated by those who clicked on links and converted to paying customers, a campaign ROI can be quickly calculated.

Obviously, most web marketers want to make at least one more dollar than it cost to execute the campaign.  And, there are some instances where web marketers will make well-calculated decisions to arrive at a negative ROI in order to achieve their campaign objectives (for instance, you might decide that acquiring a large volume of new traffic within a tight timeframe, even if there is a negative ROI, is the right long-term strategy for your site).  But ideally, campaigns will perform much better than either of these scenarios and the degree to which a campaign’s ROI is impressive or not will have much to do with a number of factors.  These include:

Pay Per Click (PPC) Campaign Management.  Achieving excellent placement in the Sponsored Links sections of search results pages is a holy grail of search marketers.  There are a number of factors that ensure a PPC campaign is well managed and optimized for the best outcomes.  These include keyword lists, bid management, geo-targeting choices, product pricing and promotion decisions, etc.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO).  While it is important to actively and accurately manage paid search campaigns, it is equally as important to ensure websites rank high in natural (or organic) search results.  Clicks on these links are free to the advertiser and can effectively lower the overall cost of a web marketing campaign when averaged with paid customer acquisition.  By effectively optimizing a website for search engines, web marketers can ensure the same paid links appear high up in natural (and therefore free) search results.

Landing Page Optimization (LPO).  Clicks from both paid and natural search results must resolve to a web page that is optimized for converting first-time or returning visitors into paying customers, which is why LPO is of such great importance to search marketing.  And, LPO is also concerned with keeping the sales cycle as short as possible.  There are both simple and sophisticated ways to manage how such pages are optimized—either dynamically or in limited tests.  Landing pages can be the homepage of a website, but more experienced web marketers will typically create a specialized landing page that ties directly to the links that generated the clicks in the first place.

Anyone interested in embarking on a web marketing campaign should do so with a measurement plan in mind.  Being able to justify the time and expense of such efforts is critical in understanding the best ways in which to attract and profitably retain customers.

So time for a Small Plug: our Yield Web Marketing Suite is a fully automated and fully integrated set of powerful modules to enable you to easily set up and manage your web marketing efforts.  And to effectively measure the ROI on your efforts.  It’s ideal for small businesses and those with limited marketing resources.  Even more sophisticated web marketers use Yield Software to make the management and tracking of campaigns fast, easy and profitable.

For more information about our Yield Web Marketing Suite, go here.

To see more blog posts in our Introduction to Web Marketing Series, go here.

One of the biggest challenges to embarking on a web marketing strategy is figuring out what all the acronyms mean. SEM, SEO, PPC, ROI, LPO, CPA… it’s an alphabet soup of new terms to learn.

But don’t let learning a few new terms and concepts deter you from undertaking what could be a very profitable way for you to move your business forward. Search engine marketing (SEM) is helping businesses of all sizes to achieve their core sales objectives, often at a much lower overall cost and with better results than alternative marketing strategies.

So let’s start with SEM: what does it mean and how does it work?

According to Wikipedia, SEM is defined as:

…a form of Internet marketing that seeks to promote websites by increasing their visibility in search engine result pages. According to the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO), SEM methods include: search engine optimization (or SEO), paid placement (also called pay-per-click or PPC ads), contextual advertising, and paid inclusion.

The largest players in the SEM space are Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft, with Google owning the largest market share by far.

A visual representation will be helpful here. In this screen shot from a Google search result page (for diesel cars… I’m looking into buying a biodiesel-fueled

Google Search Result Page (biodiesel cars)

car), you’ll see two different kinds of results. First, there are “Sponsored Links” on the top and in the right-hand column. Second, in the main part of the page, you see what are called natural or organic search results. And, at the bottom (which isn’t in this screen shot), you would typically see that this page is one of many, many pages of results.

Increasingly, businesses, periodicals, blogs, and a whole variety of information and entertainment sites receive the bulk of their traffic from clicks on the links from these search engine results pages.

When someone clicks on a link in one of the sponsored links sections, Google (in this case) is paid by the company or person who advertised that link. The price that is paid is determined by a bidding process. What Google gets paid can range from just a few cents per click to, in rare cases, hundreds of dollars.

Clicks on links in the natural search results section of the page are different. When someone clicks on a link within that section, no one pays the search enigne anything. And it means that the traffic that goes to the owners of those links is acquired for free.

These are the two most core and key concepts in SEM: paid placement within search results and natural placement within search results. Every practice within SEM has to do with how it is you can optimize your listing or placement in both kinds of results and how efficiently you can convert clicks on those links into paying (or monetize-able) customers.

These practices are broken into three major areas:

First: The process and practice of getting very high in natural search engine listings is called Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
Second: The process and practice of getting optimally positioned in paid search engine listings is called Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaign management.
And third: The process and practice of improving the rate of converting clicks on those links into customers and sales is called Landing Page Optimization (LPO).

Each of these practices can be undertaken separately, but SEM works at its best when all three are leveraged simultaneously. For novices, undertaking any one of these can feel difficult. But it doesn’t have to be.  Small Plug: this is where Yield Software is able to be a real help to you. We’ve automated all three processes, making web marketing simple, fast and profitable for you. We’ve got a free thirty-day trial that helps you get your feet wet and to see how easy leveraging all pieces of the web marketing puzzle can be.

To see more blog posts in our Introduction to Web Marketing Series, go here.