In a previous post I mentioned how keeping your landing pages looking fresh the the visitor can lead to increased conversion rates. Another important way to do that is to update your landing pages around holidays to capture the current holiday “feeling”. That definitely leads to increased performance of your landing page. Basically any change you can make to your landing page to make it look more current and less static helps, and holidays are a great way to take advantage of that. Merchants may have holiday themed landing pages you can redirect to for certain offers. But it’s also important to update your own page even with something as small as a holiday logo. A simple tweak to your logo is easy and cheap and does not require a complete redesign of the page.

Need an example? Google is probably the best known site that uses holiday logos. Here are some of their previous ones:

So spend a few minutes before the upcoming holidays to update your landing page, and watch your bounce rates go down and conversions go up. Just don’t forget to change it back after the holidays or it will have a negative effect.

When entering a new affiliate niche, most of us buy a new domain or two and start adding a bit of content to help with quality scores. But a technique that has really been working great for me in the last year is buying established sites to send the PPC traffic to. Its a pretty simple concept, just find a site that has already been aged and has good backlinks and trust established with Google. Then when you send your PPC traffic, especially Google, you are way ahead of the quality score game.

Of course, this is an extra expense for your campaign that you will have to absorb with your profits before breaking even. That is why I like to use this technique in the “ramping up” phase, after I already have a tested campaign showing some promise. I consider it a good expense though. If you are building a campaign that will be hitting hundreds or thousands a day in profit, spending a couple thousand for an established site is not much in the big picture. My most recent site buy for PPC was $4,200 for a PR4 site with over 1,000 links in a good niche. That money was recouped so many times over, and continues to pay off every day. Not to mention the site brings in about $300/mo in passive revenue – nice bonus.

The time consuming part is finding the sites/domains. You have to sift through a lot of junk to find winners. But if you have a winning campaign on Yahoo/MSN that just won’t work on Google, it might be worth your time.

My last post with landing page examples was very popular, so I thought I would review some more pages in a different niche. By critiquing these landing pages, hopefully you will get a better idea of what works for PPC affiliate marketing. My apologies if you are the owner of any of these pages that I selected.

To find these landing pages, I did a Google search for college scholarship. This seems to be a popular niche with CPA networks, although I am not personally involved in these offers.

Landing page 1

This page drops the user off on a cluttered mass of text with no discernable direction to go or path to follow. This would be a great page for quality score which is probably why it was at the top of the paid search results. Perhaps this site just wants visitors, or RSS subscribers to later sell them with an email. If that is the case, they should have made the subscribe button much more visible.

Landing page 2

This page has potential, but falls short. The smiling graduates are good, the short testimonials are good. But the page is oddly spaced and leaves a large blank area at the bottom left. The biggest problem is that the spacing of the page leaves the “next step” button a little low which can place it below the fold of some browsers. (reminder: always test your landing pages is several of the most common resolutions – the resolutions that us tech geeks use is NOT the resolution most of our customers use!)

Landing page 3

This page had the potential to be my favorite of the bunch, but had a fatal flaw. The good parts – the simple bulleted list of highlights, the prominent privacy guarantee, the trust building corporate logos, and the clear actionable path the follow. All killer components of a high converting landing page. But the fatal flaw is the page is too long, putting the submit button below the fold. This will cost conversions.

Landing page 4

This last landing page was my favorite of the bunch. First of all, everything is above the fold and nicely spaced. On the left side were extra links to content rich sections of the site. Even if visitors didn’t convert on this page, there were several opportunities on those pages for conversion. There were 5 bulleted points (which seem to be the magic number of bullets on an LP). The “start now” button was in the center of the page in perfect position for the eye to hit. Lastly, the smiling graduates is a great image to make the visitor feel good about the page. All in all a winner in my book.

I was recently taking stock of my current inventory of made for PPC sites. I looked at old sites, what we are currently working on, and what we have planned for the future. As far as sites created for the sole purpose of capturing PPC traffic to affiliate offers, I can honestly say the mini-sites we know and love are dead.

History

First a little PPC history. In 2005 and before you actually could slap up a single page landing page and do well with PPC to affiliate offers. Then when quality score started really developing and being enforced in early 2006, everyone started making the typical 5 page mini site with an article page, contact page, about page, privacy policy, and site map. These “mini-sites” as we called them we basically just an attempt to boost quality scores. They worked great for a while too. The problem is, they don’t work anymore. Google, and now even Yahoo and MSN can see right through these sites. Based on the quality scores they are assigning to this type of content, they seem to classify them as thin affiliate site. You may have some mini-sites still running and doing well (I know I do, knock on wood), but eventually their days are numbered. And going forward, I wouldn’t even try building a new mini-site for PPC purposes.

Destination sites

So where I do I see the current/future status of PPC landing sites? All of the new offers that we have been trying this year are built around what I call full destination sites. Basically you can think of the standard mini site described above, but increase that about 10 times. Articles, interactive content, dynamic content, and video even are now on these sites. This is in addition to the actual landing pages of course (that content is not on the LP). I’m also talking real unique content, not scraped wikipedia junk. Ideally, I also like to have most of the site indexed on all 3 search engines before starting the PPC campaigns for good quality score.

Negatives

The downside of course, is the time, effort and money it takes to build out these sites. You have to plan ahead to put real work into building a solid site.

Positives

The added benefit of building these destination sites, is that you are setting yourself up well for organic traffic down the road. This is a huge benefit when the offer eventually expires. You can also use the non-landing page sections of the site for extra revenue with other related offers, email/newsletter list building, or even things like Ebay affiliate or Chitika stuff. The site also builds residual value as a standalone website, unlike single landing pages which are pretty much worthless when the traffic stops flowing.

So beware when you read some of these older guides or ebooks telling you to build a mini site for PPC. To me, that is a 2006 idea and it usually won’t cut it in mid 2008.

Its always a good idea to check out your competitors landing pages to see what everyone is doing. The best way to stay current on the trends is to just browse ads in a certain niche. I was checking some of the ads on the first page Google results for the keyword”mortgage” the other day. You’d figure with such a competitive term and high dollar industry, these people would have the absolute best landing page. That is not always the case. Here’s an example of what I would consider 1 bad and 1 good landing page.

The bad:

This page is cluttered, unfocused, and leaves no clear call to action. There are a million links on the page to all the various lending programs, leaving the customer confused as what to do next. Although, it might get customers into the company’s sales funnel, I would assume this is a very low converting page.

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The good:

This page is very focused, its shows the current rate in large numbers, a big red “get started” button, a quick testimonial quote, even a smiling happy family with a dog. This page has all the factors which should lead to high conversion. A great landing page.

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So what do your landing pages resemble more? The good or the bad?

Update:   Please see our follow up post with 4 more good and bad landing page examples

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One of the biggest mistakes I see new affiliates doing is sending all the traffic in a campaign to the same landing page. This makes no sense when the keywords that the user is searching for is already prequalifying their intentions. Each step in the landing page process will lose customers (bounce rates), so if you make them jump through 3 pages to get to the conversion you might lose 50% more customers than 2 pages. You want to get customers to the conversion page as quickly and as easily as possible. This in not an exact science, but more of an art. Some offers it might be worth adding in an extra step to pre-sell the customer before hitting the money page. But others, their search term has already shown you what they want so pre-selling is pointless and leads to lower conversions. Like everything in affiliate marketing, you have to test for each specific offer. This probably will make more sense with an example.

Let’s use everyones favorite niche, ringtones (even though I stopped promoting ringtones over a year ago). When I said earlier that the search term is prequalifying the users intention, here’s what I meant.

a user searches for “verizon ringtones”. This user should NOT be sent to the standard carrier select landing page. You already know they use verizon. In this case the best bet would be to get them right to the offer. Possibly a pre-sell landing page with Verizon branding to let them know they are in the right place. You would have to test both scenarios to find the best conversion. But carrier select would be a waste.

Now what if they searched for “new cell ringtones”? With this general term, you have to make a choice. If you are splitting your traffic to multiple offers for single carriers, it might work to use the carrier select landing page. However, if you are sending everything to an offer like Flycell that includes 7 of the 8 major carriers, it might work better to skip the carrier select page and send them right to the offer. Sure, you might lose a few people who had that 8th carrier that the offer didn’t support, but the increase in conversions by skipping the extra step would probably offset that loss.

It all just comes down to really examining your keywords and adgroups to determine what the user who uses those search term really wants. Then delivering them to the offer page as seamlessly and with as few steps as possible. Don’t make them jump through hoops if they don’t need to. Most offers I run go to a mix of direct linking, redirects, pre-sells, and reinforcing pass-through landing pages. I would never send everything to the same page.

Here is how I would conceptualize the landing page decision for most cases. But keep in mind there really should be an arrow from every box to every other box, because every possibility should eventually be tested in a successful campaign.

If you have found a campaign and offer that is converting well, you probably are already running customized landing pages based on the keyword used. For example is someone searches for “carbon fiber golf clubs” you have the word “carbon fiber golf clubs” on the landing page. You probably grab the search term and display it on your page with PHP. Pretty common sense stuff. But I like to take it one step further to squeeze a higher conversion percentage from my landing pages. It’s all about choosing the type of landing page based on the intent of the keyword. Certain keywords are used by searchers at different buying stages of the buying cycle. So you don’t want to send someone looking for general information to the same landing pages as someone ready to buy. To determine what type of landing page would be best, you need to determine the web searchers intent for term they typed in.

It’s probably best described with an example:

Say you are pushing an offer on CJ for DVD players. If someone searches the term “Blue Ray DVD players”, to me that says the person is in an information gathering or comparison mode. So it makes sense to send them to a comparison type landing page. That kind of page could list different models, pros and cons, the “editors pick” (of course all of are your affiliate links). On the other hand if a person searches for “Sony BDP-S550”**, that is a person ready to buy. Model numbers are super high converting keywords and those searchers don’t need a lot of pre-sellling, if any at all. In fact, this would be a great term to direct link to the offers sales page if you can get away with it. If you have to go through a landing page, a minimal pass-through page should convert best.

There are no tools out there that will tell you the intent of the searcher typing in a keyword, and which landing page would go with it. That’s where your creativity comes in as an affiliate. But if you just put yourself in the mindset of the consumer, it should guide you in the right direction, and lead to better converting campaigns.

**(If this was a brand restricted keyword you could try leaving off the “sony”, just bid on “BDP-S550″ and phrase match it to grab the impression based off a “Sony BDP-S550″ search)

One of the best Firefox extensions I have found is Copy all URLs. I literally use this every single day and couldn’t live without it. It’s a simple tool that lets you copy a list of URLs from notepad or Excel, and paste it into Firefox and have it open each URL into its own tab. How is this helpful to the search marketer? Say you have campaign with 150 landing pages and you want to verify that each one is uploaded and looks right. Just pop into Adwords editor, copy all your ads, paste your destination URLs into Excel, then copy the list into the extension. Sit back and all 150 tabs will load with your pages. This whole process is less that 30 seconds. It’s just as easy in Yahoo, just click the “download campaign” and copy all the destination URLs from there. You should never run a campaign that you haven’t physically verified each and every landing page, and this tool makes it a breeze.

Firefox – Copy all URLS