Up to now, I refrained from blogging about the the Page Rank update that had everyone buzzing a couple weeks ago. Most of the stuff I do isn’t really affected by PR. One development truly baffles me though. A single page landing page, that has almost no content on it received a PR 3. I ran the URL through my SEO checking script and it has no backlinks, 0 indexed pages in Google, and 5 indexed pages in Yahoo. That’s it. I’m not even running a Adwords campaign to the domain, only Yahoo, MSN and a few 2nd tier PPC engines. Kind of makes you wonder what they are basing that PR update on!  Really strange.

Keeping on the landing page theme this week, here’s a topic that I am shocked to hear many people not doing. Monitoring your landing pages! There is nothing worse in PPC to affiliate marketing, than sending paid clicks to a dead page. It’s like throwing your money down a dark hole. It’s impractical to try to remember to manually check your pages, and waiting until conversions drop to 0 is not a way to monitor them. So it’s simple, just sign up for website monitoring. There are several free and paid services out there. One I like that is free for up to 100 sites is Monastic, but there are many others out there. I set up my monitors for each page to send an alert to my main email address and my cell phone. I also have my webhosts on speed dial. That way wherever I am at I will know if a landing page has dropped and can get on my host to fix it. I also use at least 2 different services for redundancy.

So if you aren’t pinging ALL of your LPs with one of these services, get on it!

Most of us slap a landing page on the receiving end of our PPC traffic, then just let it sit there. Once it’s been tested and tweaked to the optimum level, there really is no incentive to update it. But visitors like to think the page they have landed on is current, even when it’s not. That’s why I use this amazingly simple trick on many of my landing pages. I add a simple javascript date display at the top. Then whenever a user hits the landing page it always show the current date, even though I haven’t touched the page in months. In testing, I have found this actually does increase conversion rates slightly, and every little bit helps.

Here is the code snippet to add to your landing page. Enjoy.

Should I use a landing page or a redirect?

It’s a question often asked on forums for new affiliates. But it is still a question that even the most experienced affiliate struggles with. On one hand, going direct to the offer eliminates the extra click required for the customer to reach the offer, which may be losing 60% of your customers. On the other hand, pre-selling the offer may increase the final conversion rate. That’s assuming you can even get away with going direct to the offer from your PPC engine. Like almost every topic in affiliate marketing, there is no right answer. It depends on tons of different factors, but most notably the offer, and the traffic source. So in general terms let’s explore these 2 factors.

The offer:

The main question for me is, would this offer benefit from pre-selling on a landing page? If so, is that benefit great enough to outweigh the extra click required to get to the offer? Say your landing page has a bounce rate of 50%, so only half of your purchased PPC clicks actually make it to the offer. By going direct from PPC to offer, you can capture 100% of those, but how many will actually convert? By pre-selling on the landing page, you may entice those 50% that do click through to actually convert more than if you sent them directly to the offer. So how do you find out? By testing.

Say you tested both ways and sent 100 clicks directly to the offer and 100 clicks through a landing page, with a $10 lead payout, and got these results:

Direct to offer
• 100 clicks to offer
• 5% conversion rate
• 5 leads
• $50 gross

Through landing page
• 50 pre-sold clicks to offer
• 12% conversion rate
• 6 leads
• $60 gross

So in this case, yes it would be better to use a landing page, since the increase overall conversion rate offsets the loss of clicks from the extra step of the landing page.

The PPC source:

This factor is extremely important, because the source may determine whether you even have a choice to use a landing page or not. With Google, the answer seems to be you have to run a landing page. Their algorithm will almost immediately catch if you try to bounce a redirect off a landing page to an offer. The conventional wisdom is that you have to build mini sites these days to have a hope of running a campaign on Google. Even a one page landing page will usually get axed by Google, as a “bridge page”.

The other of the big 3, Yahoo and MSN, are not so quick to disallow redirects. So you usually can test out both methods with them. Down the line your ads may get bounced, but you can mostly redirect or landing page it at your own discretion. Lower tier PPC services like Looksmart, Ask, or Miva will usually not have a problem with where you are sending your traffic. They are just happy to have your business.

So the bottom is: first see if your traffic source will even allow both methods. If you have a choice, test to determine if the increase in overall conversion rate offsets the loss of clicks from the extra step of going through the landing page.

Google is now offering it’s new “Website Optimizer” in beta. At first glance this would seem to be a dream tool for affiliate marketers. It’s basically a tool that let’s you A/B test landing pages in a similar way that you can test multiple ads in Adwords. You can set up any number of landing pages with different elements, then get reports on which pages convert better. You can even make changes to your landing pages right from the tool. On the downside, Google gets to insert their tracking code into more of your pages and know even more of your business. I plan on setting up a few tests next week and report back with some results.

You can watch the demo here if you are interested.

You really do need to think outside the box to be successful in affiliate marketing. Sometimes copying what others are doing does work, but that will only get you so far. To truly break out from the pack, you need to think differently about what you are doing.

Part of thinking outside the box, is constant testing. For me that means testing totally crazy stuff, because you never know what might hit. Sure, most of it will fail miserably, but occasionally you will get a winner.

Here’s a funny example of something I tested that was off the wall. I don’t like to give specifics of what is converting well from me, and what niches I am in (can you blame me?), but ringtones are always safe to talk about. Everyone does them. So I got to thinking about the standard boring, “pick your carrier” landing page that everyone uses. I asked myself what would be the opposite of this landing page? This is what I came up with.

 

Yes, that’s the whole landing page, no need to reload your browser. Just a white background with 2 small words. The amazing thing is, the bounce rate was about the same as the page I was running at the time! Conversions were a little lower probably due to a few lost carriers not supported by the offer it was going to, but surprisingly it worked pretty well. Since then I have hit on something that works way better, but at the time it worked great. I found my current landing page by “crazy” testing, just like this.

So get creative and stop following the pack!

Are you good at designing landing pages? I am looking for a web designer who is an ace at designing high visual impact/low page weight single landing pages. Payment would be on a per project basis. Shoot me an email at designer@directoryvault.com if you are interested or know anyone who is!

One of the best ways to test the effectiveness of you landing pages is through Google Analytics Bounce Rate metric. This particular report can be found under content optimization, navigational analysis, entrance page bounce rates. With a bit of tweaking you can view a chart like this:

So what does this show? Well, like in golf, a lower number is better here. The lower the percentage, the more people are clicking through your landing page and taking the action you want them to. The higher the percentage, the more people are abandoning your landing page. In the example above, the landing page with the 46.3% rate is the most effective page, while the 76.5% page is pretty bad. This is a tremendously important way to gauge the effectiveness of your landing pages.

It’s also import because it gives you an even more detailed view than just conversion rate. For example if you have a 5% conversion rate, you still don’t know how many people are abandoning your landing page versus abandoning the affiliate offer page. By looking at bounce rate, you can tell not only the average rate that users click through your page, but also you now know how many users get all the way to the affiliate offer page then quit without buying. Pretty good stuff.