I noticed that Google is starting to estimate your likelihood of display for site-selection ads. Trouble is, anyone who does any level of CPM tuning will have different bids on many sites, and the estimate only seems to apply to the default. If they showed the estimate for individual sites, that might be useful. ” Display likelihood is estimated only at the ad group level. Similar estimates are not available on a site-by-site basis.” says Google.

 

Having a focused, promise-keeping landing page is a concept that experienced Pay Per Click advertisers know well. Often learning this truism happens the hard way - after spending thousands of wasted dollars. One of the most important design lessons that I’ve learned when it comes to any sort of web page is this:

The Landing Page Must Meet The Customer Where They Are.

Use whatever technology or methodology that’s necessary. Never make the customer come to you - and with landing pages this means that your page content should seem like an extension of the conversation already in their mind before they ever visited your site.

Create content that engages them at speed. Think of the way the fighter jets have to line up to the airborne tankers for refueling. They must match speed, altitude and discharge static electricity. There is a net airspeed difference of zero as they exchange the payload. The same is true on a Landing Pag - if you require them to change direction you will not connect.

 

Assure the Visitor of Safety and Security

If your conversation with the customer is weighted by their worry of future spam, pressure, or added costs, you need to find ways of setting them at ease. This often happens by putting yourself in their shoes. But you must also turn their shoes over and see where they’ve been. Think back to the keywords, and the ads they clicked on. Remember who they are, and what their intent was. What were their alternatives, should they leave your site? What is your leverage? How tentative are they?

If your site and company are unfamiliar to them, display third party reliability indicators which underscore your commitment to their security and demonstrate your technical competence to conduct secured commerce.

Maintain a Positive Balance in Your Time & Goodwill Bucket

Internet searching is work. It’s an investment of time that is competing against other things in a persons’ life. To find a result through a search, click on it, and begin consuming content is an additional investment of their time. Quickly and early in the content the visitor must feel like they are being given relevant information at a rate faster than they could have acquired it through their own efforts.

Be sure the Call to Action is a Natural, if not Anticipated, Next Step

No jarring “Go Here Now” buttons. The next step should be something the reader is almost seeking out. If the landing page text is well written, the reader should be almost anticipating moving forward to the next step. If it’s a sign up, or a lead form - the anticipation should be for that form.

Maintain Low Friction When Asking for Their Information

Put off as much information gathering as you can for your business scenario. Much can be gathered at later stages. The longer the form, the lower your conversion rate will be. Remember the game “Don’t Break The Ice”? It’s like this. You want to get as much as you can without breaking the threshold. If you lose a customer you’ve just paid $1.20 for in PPC, that money is gone forever.

Use Search Text (or topically related text) in the Page Headlines/Captions When Possible.

If you can, use the search text (or text that represents it) inside the landing page text. This is available from most modern Pay-per-click engines as parameters. Make sure it reads well. This gives the page a tightly relevant feeling. But be careful, it can also look unnatural if used improperly.

Show them the Light at the End of the Tunnel

Don’t make visitors wonder how long the process of interacting with your page will take. Make the pages have a definite end, and make it clear. I like “signatures” or “PS.” blocks. These are a natural language for “closure” in the minds of readers. This closure tells people that the investment they’re making is limited, and helps with the economic decision of time we all make when viewing a website. “Yes, it’s worth it to stick around long enough to read it… it’s not that long.”

 

It’s well known that the closer your keyword, ads, and landing pages are related in the mind of the searcher, the more likely they are to convert. So it’s important that you design your advertising “funnel” to retain the confidence of the searcher from first click through ordering. I thought I’d show you a few tricks that have proven themselves over the years, starting with the most basic - the Google Keyword Insertion method, then talking about Dynamic Landing pages, and ultimately specialized product linkages from ads.

With Google Adwords (and other PPC engines,) it is possible to construct Ads inside of AdGroups so that the search terms are dynamically inserted into ads. Done wisely your ads can achieve 2-3x the click through rates of static ads (or more) and reap the higher levels of quality scores that come with it. In my methodology, each adgroup will have a set of ads associated with it (that you are testing,) and all of those ads will have a dynamic headline (explained below.)

Remember, the structure of a Google Ad Campaign is:

Campaign -> Adgroup -> Ad <- keywords

Figuring the Adgroup Divisions out is the hard part - where should you divide your groups? What is a theme? This will be specific to your own campaign. Some marketers call this things like “Peel and Stick” but I’ve always just called it finding the sweet spots!

For example: Let’s say you sell auto parts and have divided out your tire gauges into an adgroup. You’ve done your keyword research and got them all set up as exact match phrases (in Google, those are the ones with the []’s around them.)

exact match keywords:
[car tire gauge]
[automotive tire gauge]
[tire gauges for cars]
….many more (typically 80-100)

So now you write the ad… but instead of a normal headline you add a syntax like this

{KeyWord: default keyphrase} - capitalize every word of headline
{Keyword: default keyphrase} - capitalize only the first word
{keyword: default keyphrase} - lower case throughout

So here’s our ad:

{KeyWord: Quality Tire Gauges} <— “Quality Tire Gauges” is our default text.
30-120 PSI - Brass Fittings
Made in USA - Will Last Years
Tire-Gauge-Site.com

If it can, Google will substitute the searched keyword here in place of “Quality Tire Gauges” (our default if none of the keyphrases) with one of the exact match keyphrases. As you can probably guess, it’s best if you have just about every derivative of keyword covered in your keyword list (a tool such as keyword elite can be a big helper here) and that you make sure you never go over 25 characters (the current limit for the headline of an Adwords ad.) So, if a user searches for “car tire gauges” on Google, this sponsored link will appear

Car Tire Gauges <–
30-120 PSI - Brass Fittings
Made in USA - Will Last Years
Tire-Gauge-Site.com

So instead of a generic phrase that is “close” to the phrase the customer searched for, you now hit it perfectly every time. Google will now “bold” the text on the ad every time for you, and you’ll have a much better chance of obtaining and selling to those customers

You can also use phrase or broad matches, but keep in mind that your default text will show more often since broad and phrase maches often end up having more than 25 characters pretty often, plus, you lose control over the headline, and sometimes they can be pretty funny.

Watch for Part two: Altering your landing page on the fly - slightly more advanced!

http://www.google.com/igoogle now redirects to http://www.google.com/ig … does that make it official?

When Google Personalized Results (iGoogle) are turned on, the results you see in your search reflect your own personal preference, geographic location, and possibly “gadget influence”. So, if the new gadget maker is so easy to use, will we see a big proliferation of gadgets that make searching easier for people (e.g. expectant mothers information?) Could it become a “search results in a box” type system, with the results inside packaged like the the “finds” system on prefound.com.

Perhaps we’ll start thinking about the user, not the results list. You’re talking about a specific customer at a specific point of consideration. Rather than talking about #1 in Google, we’ll need to talk about things in terms of engagement and hooks.

Content is going to need to get a whole-ton better. This is a good thing, but it’s going to be hard for website owners to swallow. The offers on a web page for genuinely helpful information, targeted to the consumer at a specific moment in time, are key to conversions.

Optimization of content for the customer and their consideration cycles is going to need to be built in to design and development. As much as the “pure designers” don’t like SEO/SEM types, we’re going to need to get along now. CMS-based sites are going to skyrocket in popularity, as are blogs-as-sites.

It’s still unclear how many will build Gadgets, but what I see is a proliferation of hundreds of different little Googlettes, doing their own things based on rules. We’ll have no control over what the users see on their screen. They may see search results float over their screen like soap bubbles or fall over like dominos. We just won’t know. But one thing is clear, you can’t do SEO on an individual Gadget….

5/1/07: Update: Now that I’ve tried the gadget maker, I’m underwhelmed.

Changes in Googles Adwords algorithm have had a major impact in the ability to use this tool for affordable testing of highly focused landing pages. There is a correlation in my experience between volume of content and cost of bids. So “pure” landing page design “labs” have really become a challenge of late. What was once the perfect method for refining messages is now subject to the penalization of Google’s Quality Score and rapidly increasing minimum bids. It used to be that Yahoo! was available for such testing, but not anymore. The old fall-back behaves similarly on “pure” landing pages.

So is there a way to accomplish tight testing with Adwords without distracting customers from the “eyepath” and call-to-action? The risk is that we’ll lose leads as customers move away from our page into other content. What was initially a plea for information (and thus a lead) has become a skimming reader and no lead. We were able to provide information as a reward using a CRM tool and being a sales process rather than just posting it all on the landing page.

But now, these pages are going to have to become micro-sites, contining sufficient content to bring down the bids while retaining enough interest to acquire the all-important customer information. Micro-niche marketing is not getting easier, nor is testing via PPC engines.

This is just another good reason to design the sites properly from the beginning rather than trying to produce too many corrective actions via sub-designs.

Hey! Another timesaver… the Adwords interface now sports a link to the Google Website Optimizer.

Nice! Oh wait. You can’t use it if you’re logged in via the MCC. There goes the time savings. Oh, well, easy come, easy go.