Landing Page – An active webpage where customers will ‘land’ when they click your ad. The web address for this page is often called a ‘destination URL’ or ‘clickthrough URL.’

Below is a list of 7 deadly sins for landing page designs. The list was taken from a webinar from Tim Ash, a consultant from Google.

Have you committed one of the “7 deadly sins of landing page design?”

1. Unclear Call to Action
   Ensure that traffic is sent to a page where the desired action is clearly defined. If you wish for them to book a room night, have a large visible button that allows the customer to book a room night.
2. Too Many Visual Distractions
   A page filled with too many visual distractions, whether its photos of products or flashing banners or AdSense ads, will likely not convert as well. Keep the page simple, clean, and to the point.
3. Too Much Text
   A landing page should not be text heavy. Keep sentences short and simple, and convey your message using bullet points.
4. Not Keeping Promises
   Your AdCopy says: Buy 2 get 1 free, but if this same offer cannot be found on the landing page, you are not keeping that promise. If you have an attractive offer in your AdCopy, make sure that it is easily found on the landing page.
5. Long Forms
   Keep forms as short and concise as possible. Only include fields where it’s absolutely essential for the existing transaction.
6. Invisible Risk Reducers
   If your business is accredited by the BBB, or if your website is hacker safe and tested on a daily basis, be sure to include these logos above the fold.
7. Trust Indicators
   If your business is highly rated or raved about by another company of trust, place that logo above the fold as well. For example, if Conde Nast named your hotel as one of the “Top 500 Hotels in the World”, adding this trust indicator will surely help increase trust, and hopefully conversion.

We are Google Adword Professionals and we can help you implement a successful search engine marketing campaign. Contact us through the blog or on our website, SalesOverNight.com. If you’re company is in the medical industry check out of dedicated medical marketing website, LEVELTWO | Medical.

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As a search marketing professional, misspelled search terms are not surprising to us, but our readers may find it comical that a large percentage of searches performed are misspelled. For example take a look at Yahoo’s list of some of the more common misspelled searches.

Recent Misspelled Yahoo Searches

• Swan Flu (for Swine Flu)
• Susan Boil (for “Britain’s Got Talent” contender Susan Boyle)
• Brack Obama (for U.S. President Barack Obama)
• Sonia Sotomeyer (for Supreme Court justice nominee Sonia Sotomayor)
• Rachel Ray (for Food Network host Rachael Ray)
• Paperview boxing (for cable programming pay-per-view boxing)
• Amtrack (for train system Amtrak)
• Wallmart (for retailer Wal-Mart)
• Farrah Faucet (for actress Farrah Fawcett)
• Rod Steward (for singer Rod Stewart)
• Arlene Specter (for Senator Arlen Specter)
• “Dancing With the Starts” (for ABC reality competition Dancing With the Stars)
• Bea Author” (for the late comedian Bea Arthur)
• Brittany Spears (for singer Britney Spears)
• Chris Allen (for “American Idol” winner Kris Allen)
• Configure worm (for computer virus Conficker worm)
• Mysapce (for MySpace)

While it is entertaining to think that people are searching for “paperview boxing”, targeting commonly misspelled keywords in your search campaign is key to successful search engine marketing. The majority of your clicks will be from the correct spelling, but for the few people that misspell a keyword you, as an advertiser, will be able to show them a relevant ad while the other competitors’ ads will not show because they are only advertising on the correct spelling.

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Pay-per-click – A great method to drive lots of visitors to your website that are interested in your products or services.

After the click – Understanding what those visitors are doing once they reach your website, specfically if they are not calling you or filling out a form.

5 reasons to track after the click:

1. The tracking cookie is saved on the visitor’s computer for 30 days after the visit so you can know if they click now and return to your website later.
2. Return on Investment (ROI) is the most important metric. Your cost per click or click through rate might be great, but unless you know how much you are making for every dollar you invest, the other metrics are useless.
3. You can expand on keywords that provide the most ROI and generate even more profit.
4. Keywords that contain a brand or company name may provide a lot of traffic, but when you track the ROI of these keywords you might find that they provide little to no profit.
5. After you know the visitors that are taking some kind of action on your website, you can then determine where your most active markets are located geographically and develop a campaign specifically targeting those buyers.

In order to track after the click activity (using Google Adwords) you will need to make use of the Conversion Tracking feature (pictured below).

The set up is really simple. The first step is to name your conversion action.

TIP: If your forms all send the same formated message and there is no way for you to tell where each specific form came from, it’s important be very specific when naming your conversion. In the example we named our conversion “Landing Page B Contact Form” because we have 4 different landing pages for this client and we want to know which page is getting more leads.

The rest of the setup is really straight forward so we’ll skip to the next page after you save the action and get your conversion code.

On this page you are presented with the code to place on your “thank you” page.

Read related blog posts about Search Engine Marketing

• Effective Landing Pages, 7 Tips
• What is Search Engine Marketing?
• How to do Keyword Research for Search Marketing
• What is Dynamic Keyword Insertion?
• What is Clickthrough Rate and Cost Per Click?
• How to make your Website more Trustworthy
• 4 Reasons why Traffic Quality is Important

Ask us a question on Twitter @LEVELTWO

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Great tips on how to use Google Analytics to get the most out of Google Adwords.

Google Analytics in 60 Seconds: Find the Best Keywords
Google Analytics in 60 Seconds: Location Targeting
Google Analytics in 60 Seconds: Find Poor Performing Campaigns and Keywords
Google Analytics in 60 Seconds: Placement Targeting
Google Analytics in 60 Seconds: Identifying High Spenders
Google Analytics in 60 Seconds: Conversion Funnels
Google Analytics in 60 Seconds: Tracking Ecommerce with Google Analytics

via Adwords blog

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Do you know the search marketing language?

Previous posts:
What is Search Engine Marketing?
What is Social Media Marketing?

CTR, CPC, PPC, ROI, DKI… It’s all pretty confusing when those crazy internet guys start talking in their foreign language. Let’s define (in plain English) two common terms in search marketing, Clickthrough Rate and Cost Per Click.

Clickthrough Rate (CTR) is obtained taking the number of people who clicked on an ad and dividing it by the number of times the ad was delivered (impressions). For example, if your ad had 2,500 impressions in one month and it received 194 clicks, it would have a CTR of 7.8% for that month.

It is important to know that different industries will have varying levels of successful CTR. What may be a high clickthrough rate in one industry may be considered low in another. So, it’s difficult to determine an average CTR for everyone. For large volume industries that get millions of nationwide searches a day, you may find that 2% is a great CTR. However some campaigns may find a CTR of 14% to be their benchmark.

The reason it’s important to strive for the best clickthrough rate is because the more people that find your ad to be relevant, the lower your cost per click will be (specifically citing Google Adwords ranking formula).

Cost Per Click (CPC) is the amount of money an advertiser pays search engines or other Internet publishers for a single click on its ad that brings one visitor to its website. This term is much easier to understand since it’s so straight forward. No formulas needed. Well… Let’s do one, just for fun.

Pretty simple, right? Cost per click is just how much you pay per visitor that comes to your site through an ad that you place on a search engine. You want this number to be as low as possible so you won’t be spending a fortune on your search engine marketing.

Still confused? Yell at us by leaving a comment below. We’ll answer your toughest questions or delete the comment.

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