The landing page that you decide on to send potential customers to from your paid search campaigns can be the difference between a failure (low conversion rate) and a success (high conversion rate).

Landing pages differ greatly depending on what the company is trying to achieve. With some paid search campaigns the company may be looking to capture potential customer email details or trying to target particular customers for a training event they have planned. There is no framework or art in creating the perfect landing page as their are too many performance variables that can change depending on the landing pages usage. The only way to increase the performance of your paid search campaign is by testing and optimising the landing pages that you send your visitors to.

A popular and particularly easy starting point for testing the performance of your landing pages, is to link your relevant advert directly to specific product page. For example if an individual entered the search query “Canon PowerShot S95″ the advert would contain this text copy and the destination URL would go directly to the product page with this particular camera model on as seen below.

The second option that you have is to link your paid search advert to a category listing landing page. Again an individual may be searching for a particular camera, and enter “Canon PowerShot S95″ into the search box. Instead of “deep linking” the potential buyer to the specific camera landing page you send them to a category page as seen below.

Although the results of deep linking and category linking can vary greatly depending on a number of different factors, here is however advantages of both deep linking (direct to a product) or category linking.

Deep Linking

1. Relevancy

If an individual is searching for a specific product they may know exactly what they are looking for and are ready to make the purchase. By deep linking, it narrows down the opportunity of chance, and prevents the visitor from having to look for what they are trying to purchase. By linking directly to a specific product, conversion rates can be higher.

2. Prevent laziness

Many online buyers are lazy and are looking to make a purchase of a particular product quickly and efficiently. By linking them directly to this product it may provide you with an edge over competitive websites who send visitors to a category landing page.

3. Price Check

Much like with the majority of products or services people buy, price is usually a huge factor in whether a visitor makes a purchase or not. By clearly presenting the price on the product landing page it allows a customer to make a decision whether it is the price they are willing to pay or not.

4. Reduced Exit Rate

By sending a potential customer to a product landing page you are as such cutting out the users need to search or navigate to the product. By cutting down on this “breadcrumb” path you should notice a lower exit rate in your analytics. There is also the advantage of preventing a visitor choosing a cheaper (lower profit margin) product if they see alternative options.

5. Direct bookmarking/social sharing

By deep linking to a product page that an individual is looking for they can instantly bookmark this landing page for future preference. As well as this, they are also able to directly share this landing page with family members and other future potential customers with a simple click of their mouse.

Category Linking

1. Choice

If you give your visitor the essence of choice you  have more chance of them picking to browse at least one product. Choice also allows potential customers to compare the product they are looking for with other products that are similar. This could lead to an increased opportunity of up selling by displaying relevant products such as camera bags, lenses and memory cards with the original product the customer was looking for.

2. Less Pressure

By linking a visitor to the category page you are reducing the pressure that they might have on them. By providing them with clear product options, it leaves them with a more friendly shopping environment where they can browse through the products that interest them.

3. Authentication

You own an ecommerce website with 3 products for sale and your competitor has 10,000 products for sale. If the website with 10,000 products links a potential customer to a category page it gives out a sense of credibility. It might suggest that they are a larger, more established company and will be in business a lot longer than a website with a couple of products for sale.

4. Branding

The more times you see a logo, slogan or a tag line the more it becomes in bedded into your mind. By linking a visitor who has never seen your website to a category page it allows them to see a complete overall of your website, allowing them to compare the products you have for sale, read the about page etc. The more products that you display in front of a visitor, the more time they are going to spend on your website. This can lead to increased brand awareness.

As mentioned previously, landing pages differ greatly depending on the produce or service you are trying to sell or the details that you are trying to collect. By comparing the results from both of these you will notice if deep linking is performing better than category linking or visa versa. By making these simple destination URL changes it can make a difference between a conversion rate of 1% and 2%, so it is definitely worth your time testing.

If you have any experiences with deep linking or category linking and examples of what has worked for you please post them in the comments section below.

As you may have already seen on a fair few blogs, the start of the year is the time when we reflect on last years predictions and aspirations and post our predictions for the year ahead. 2010 was a big year for the paid search industry, with the movement from the traditional contextual based advertising into a more universal based model that incorporates different ways of targeting and reaching your audience. With the introduction of remarketing, site links, contextual adverts in videos and other targeting options Google was the main innovator in the paid search market.

Although I personally feel the need to post these predictions for the year a head it does not necessarily mean I will be correct in my assumptions. They may just help you to think about what may happen this year based on my personal experiences and trends that may continue to develop from the previous years.

1) Paid Search will get bigger

Despite many people still not understanding or being completely oblivious to what paid search is and how the model works for a business it will still get bigger in 2011. I use the word “bigger” in terms of spend, revenue, volume and the adoption of new websites/networks taking up the contextual advertising model.  Research by Covario found that growth in 2010 for paid search globally was up 26% over 2009 spending. In the past 3 years paid search spending has increased year on year in the Americas and this is not expected to slow down any time soon. The graph below illustrates how global spending has increased since 2007:

2) Mobile will become a major part any PPC strategy

The amount of people around the globe who are browsing the Internet (not WAP) on their mobile phones is continuing to grow year on year. With the introduction of the Ipad and new smart phone technology, mobile search advertising revenues is expected to grow from $39 million in 2008 to $2.3 billion by 2013 with annual growth of up to 125.6 percent (Kelsey Group). As part of this increase in mobile users, search engines and other advertising networks are developing new tools that will allow independent advertisers and large corporations to target their specific customer base. With the introduction of call extensions for Adwords and the hype of call tracking in 2010, this particular industry is continuously looking to progress and I believe it will explode during 2011. With this, mobile paid search should become a fundamental part of any online advertising strategy. The graph below illustrates how the percentage share of paid search clicks with mobile advertising has continued to rise from late 2008.

3) Paid search will grow from its traditional routes

As previously mentioned, I think that paid search will move from being solely a business model that search engines utilise into a model that other networks and portals will implement. With websites such as Plenty of Fish and Facebook implementing contextual advertising channels in 2010 I believe this trend will continue to increase as their is a demand for advertisers to reach a higher volume of targeted customers from different markets around the globe. With the sheer size of Facebook and and the introduction of Facebook search (which is inevitable) it will definitely be one to watch out for in 2011. To add to this, I have a feeling that other organisations such as eBay and Amazon will implement a contextual based PPC model to their web properties, as it allows advertisers to target their customers without the high levels of financial risk.

4) Remarketing will be the new “thing”

With the introduction of remarketing by Google in 2010, I believe that more and more advertisers will be looking to use this as they continue to look for new ways of targeting their customers. Yahoo already offer remarketing based on a users search history and I think this market is definitely going to grow in 2011 with browser search history being one of the vital steps that search engines will need to implement.

5) Automation will rule

As technology continuous to grow in the online advertising world, companies will move from traditional manual bidding as part of the paid search day to day activities to bid automation and other paid search platforms that will automate the tasks for them. This will save time when analysing, optimising, and testing advertising campaigns leading to lower labour costs. With more companies entering this market than previously the amount of automated platforms that are available to companies will increase fourfold. Search engines will continue to promote these type of platforms as it leads to increased spend and revenues for them!

So there it is, my 5 paid search predictions for the year ahead. I will continue to update the blog with new technologies and updates that search engines and other advertising networks introduce throughout the year. If you have any predictions in relation to paid search or any other disciplines related to digital marketing feel free to post them in the comments section below. Looking forward to hearing your thoughts!

When it comes to using Google Adwords as your paid search platform there is nothing more important than understanding how Quality Score can affect your campaigns. By having a clear understanding of how Quality Score is calculated and fluctuates it can help you to make decisions that can drastically decrease the amount you pay per click and provide you with an advantage over your competition.

According to Google, Quality Score is the basis of measuring the quality and relevance of your adverts determining your minimum cost per click (CPC) bid for both Google search results and the Google search network. The Quality Score is determined by a variety of different factors including; keywords click through rate, the relevance of your advert text, the quality of your landing pages and the relevance of the keyword and to advert to the users search query.

Below is a graph illustrating the different factors that make up your Google quality score for Google search and the Search Network. (Note that the factor percentages are a rough guide as know one knows exactly what makes up the quality score.)

Now that we have a deeper understanding of what factors make up your Quality Score we can use them to make wiser decisions what needs to be improved or added to your accounts. Below are a selection of optimisation tips that should help you improve your scores.

Historical Click Through Rate (CTR)

As the graph above illustrates, the historical click through rate (CTR) of the keyword and the matched advert on Google is by far the largest factor in determining Quality score. As such, this should be the main focus when trying to improve the Quality Scores that you currently have in your account. Despite many paid search experts suggesting you should increase your maximum CPC to increase your advert position, which in turn will increase your click through rate is only half of the story. The reason for this is if you keep your existing advert for a irrelevant keyword just because the position of your advert is displayed higher doesn’t necessarily mean your click through rate will increase. So in order to increase your click through rate, it is fundamental that you create high relevant adverts that potential customers will want to click on. By displaying relevant and “click worthy” adverts based on a users query you have a much higher chance of your click through rate increasing.

Golden Nugget: Although dynamic keyword insertion doesn’t have a direct affect on your Quality Score, in terms of advert relevance it can help to increase the relevance of your advert based on a users query subsequently leading to a higher click through rate.

Relevance of the Keyword and the Advert

The second largest factor in determining your Quality Score is the relevance of the keyword and the advert to the users search query. By splitting your keywords into smaller and more relevant ad groups it allows Google’s advert system to display the most relevant advert based on the keywords that they have entered. Some advertisers who use Adwords will place hundreds of keywords into one ad group, which is one of the most common reasons why many adverts display for the irrelevant keyword searches resulting in very low CTR’s.

Historical CTR of the Display URL’s

Optimising adverts is another action that many Google Adwords users do not seem to understand and therefore do not partake in. In a lot of the campaigns I have seen, it is common for advertisers to have one or maybe two adverts in each ad group. By limiting yourself to this, it prevents you from comparing or benchmarking one adverts performance against another. By having at least four adverts per ad group it allows you to run reports on each of these and to make a decision on which one is performing the best. By pausing the adverts that have a lower CTR (usually below 1% is what you are looking for) you are able to leave Google’s advert system to display the adverts that have a higher CTR.

Warning: If you have conversion tracking enabled for a particular campaign you should take CPA (Cost per conversion) as factor when optimising your adverts. This however doesn’t have a direct effect on your Quality Scores so you should analyse the adverts that have conversions closely.

Quality of the Landing Page

When setting up a campaign in Adword’s many people simply think that putting some keywords into ad groups, throwing some advert copy together and setting your campaign live will create a successful online marketing campaign. However it isn’t quite this simple, and Google understands the importance of the quality of your landing page as a factor that should be taken into serious consideration when paying for traffic. By creating highly relevant, high quality landing pages according to Google’s landing page and site quality guidelines you are also able to improve your Quality Scores as well as your conversion rates. A “quality” landing page would consist of a well designed page layout, correct use of keywords in titles and headings, well written unique content with obvious call to action text or buttons.

Final thoughts

In the past advertising networks such as Google allowed those companies with the largest budgets to bid as much as they wished for each keyword they used. By introducing Quality Score, Google are able to allow advertisers with a lower budget to compete with those high budget advertisers by providing relevant adverts based on a users search query. By understanding Quality Score you are at a great advantage over many advertisers who believe that the highest bidder makes the top advert positions. By improving your Quality Score you are able to reduce your overall spend leading to a lower cost per conversion.

Although this post focuses mainly on the Google Quality Score it is worth noting that other networks including Yahoo Advertising! and MSN Adcenter have a very similar ranking method in order to provide a fairer ground for advertisers with both large and small budgets.

I hope this has helped you out in one way or another and I ask you to post  any thoughts, comments or experiences with Quality Scores in the comments section below. Feel free to post any questions you have as well, I’d love to help you out.

Whilst using Google Adwords or any other paid search platform, every individual whether it be an independent marketer selling a newly published book or a large corporation selling financial audits are looking for the following things:

- The highest amount of qualified clicks possible at the lowest possible cost.
- Highly targeted traffic that allows you to reach your specific business objectives.
- Traffic with the lowest bounce rate from the specific landing page of the destination URL.

Paid search specialists and other online practitioners are constantly talking about keywords, negative keywords, landing pages and other advert extensions such as site links when referring to increasing the quality of paid traffic from your campaigns. However, one of the most fundamental aspects of any paid search campaign is the quality and relevancy of the adverts that are displayed to a potential customer. Whether this be for a small campaign with a couple of hundred keywords or a large campaign with ten thousand keywords, if adverts that are displayed infront of a possible customer are highly relevant based on their particular search query, you as a marketer have the advantage over a competitor.

In this post I am not going into the specifics of what advert copy works in which industry or whether telling a story in your advert will increase your conversions, but will provide you with more information regarding the mindsets that your customers can in at different times during the online buying cycle.

When trying to market any product or service everyone knows that it is essential that you know exactly who your customers are, where they are located, what their buying habits consist of and exactly what they are looking for in the product or service that you as a business are offering. However, even though the marketing department has all of this information and data about its customers, when it comes down to creating a paid search campaign they forget something that is vitally important. It is crucial to understand that when a person is looking (searching) for a particular product or service on the Internet they can be in either one of three different mindsets. I will go through each of these mindsets separately and explain what your role is as a paid search marketer is for each one.

Mindset 1 – Informative or surfing mode

The individual is not quite sure that they need or want so will be searching for problem focused words. The individual could also be looking for a solution to a particular problem they have or are looking for an alternative to a product they believe hasn’t lived up to their expectations in the past.

Your role as the paid search marketer

In order to target these particular people the advert needs to display a particular solution to an individuals problem or challenge. You will need to explain in your advert why your product is “better” than a competitors and why it will solve the problem that they are incurring.

An example of the advert that would suit this buyers mindset would be:

Mindset 2 – Comparison or review finding mode

This mode explains the sudden rise in review and comparison websites on the Internet over the previous few years. Also known as the “looking around” mode, individuals know what they are looking for but are looking for other people’s reviews about them and experiences that they have faced.

Your role as the paid search marketer

If a potential customer enters a search query such as “compare tires” it is a great idea to have an advert that mentions the keywords “compare” or “review” and then takes them to a landing page that compares their manufacturer to others in the market. Other keywords that can be focused on include: best, reviewed, rated and customer opinions. Make sure your product is the cheapest or proven to be the “best” if you use this text copy in your adverts.

An example of the advert that would suit this buyers mindset would be:

Mindset 3 – Buying mode

This mindset can be seen to many marketers as the “perfect” mindset for any of their customer to be in. For an individual to get into this mindset it can take days or even weeks of research through reading comparison websites, speaking to their friends and family or reading about the product or service in a consumer published magazine. In this particular mindset the individual will know exactly what they are looking for, even down to the specific model number of the product they are looking to purchase.

Your role as the paid search marketer

Despite the individual knowing exactly what they are looking for, it is still quite possible they you will lose their custom to a competitor if a relevant advert is not displayed on their screen after they have entered their search query. In this particular mindset, it is essential that if an individual types in the product and the product number (canon eos rebel t2i for example) that the advert headline has this precise text copy found in it. Other keywords that would work well in the advert include: buy now, cheap, free shipping, lowest price, satisfaction guaranteed, purchase today. Remember to think about your marketing aims and objectives whilst writing these adverts, as well as how you are looking to portray your brand. If you are trying to sell Gucci products for example, you would not want to use the keyword “cheap” in your advert copy as it is seen as a luxury product brand.

An example of the advert that would suit this buyers mindset would be:

All experienced paid search marketers realise that it takes a variety of different factors to receive the highest ROI for any paid search campaign. However, by displaying adverts to potential customers based on their current mindsets it can really help with both increasing brand awareness and increasing conversions.

Although it may take time getting used to writing adverts like this, this time can most definitely pay off in the long term. Go ahead and try it with some of your campaigns today and you should notice the difference in the results you receive!

I would love to hear your opinions and experiences using this technique for displaying targeted adverts in your campaigns. Best of luck.