Online Marketing Blog

If pay-per-click ads are the welcome mat to the house of your business, landing pages are the entryway. The welcome mat may get people in the door, but the entryway convinces them to stay. The look and feel of your ‘entryway’ needs to be inviting and interesting to get your visitors to move forward in their relationship with your business. A good, engaging landing page is critical to gaining the conversions that are the meat of your pay per click ad, whether your defined conversion metric is driving traffic to your site, selling a product or gaining prospect contact information.

Sage Lewis of Search Engine Watch Expert and President of SageRock.com introduced this SES session on landing page optimization. Speaker Tim Ash, president of Site Tuners and landing page expert, brought his enthusiasm for his topic and his practical advice to this session of useful tips.

Many business owners and marketers can agree the current economy is having an impact on marketing plans, making every dollar and click matter. As part of the TopRank Account Team, I am excited to learn a new perspective to help clients increase conversions for their marketing campaigns.

Bryan Eisenberg, Co-founder of Future Now Inc., along with Brett Crosby, Group Manager for Google, shared insight to identify missed conversations and how to improve your landing page and increase PPC ROI.

Pay Per Conversion, as explained by Eisenberg, is a shift from our Pay Per Click mentality. No longer focusing our efforts to just get the click, but rather transforming those clicks into a business opportunity or conversion.

For the 5th year in a row, MarketingSherpa has published their Search Marketing Benchmark Guide which has been completely re-written and edited including results from the Marketing Sherpa members search marketing survey, other studies performed over the last 12 months and “best of” research provided by over 50 respected sources.

The SEM Benchmark Guide is helpful for marketers looking to get a handle on the state of the SEM industry, trends, strategies and tactics.

If you’re a data enthusiast, there are 215 charts, tables and eyetracking heatmaps to help illustrate what’s happening in search marketing and what companies need to be paying attention to. There are also several good case studies. This particular edition is formatted into 5 sections:

While I am presently an offline/online media relations guy, my background spans a variety of media and tactics. As such, I have always been fascinated with the phenomena of SuperBowl advertisements. What other event allows you to generate buzz simply by making a media buy?

When it comes to search, it is nearly useless to play Monday morning quarterback with SuperBowl advertisements. Whether Budweiser had a funnier ad than FedEx is not necessarily relevant to our world. But in order to determine whether companies maximized their $2.7 million investment, it is important to assess the lasting impact on searches for their products.

In a trend that is sure to continue, many companies endeavored to drive traffic to their website in hopes of generating online buzz. Godaddy.com was certainly the most explicit about this tactic, sending viewers online to catch a racy “forbidden” ad featuring NASCAR sensation Danica Patrick.

A full house was in attendance for this SES NY session in which panelists discussed how to squeeze the most out of analytics and turn data into action.

Specifically, Avinash Kaushik, Author, Blogger, Analytics Evangelist from Google shared the following.

3 Tips to Getting More out of Analytics

1. Measure bounce rate

As Avinash described this is essentially when someone comes to your website, vomits and leaves. OR in a less disgusting but not as funny way this is a visitor who having not found what they were looking for left the site immediately.

Be sure to measure bounce rates to understand the number of individuals who are abandoning the website. While some of the traffic will be irrelevant and therefore always likely to bounce, the majority are bouncing because the information they want (while it may be on your website) is not at their fingertips.

Focus is a tricky thing. Especially when describing a product that has so much too it. How can you possibly explain a detailed product, like a customized laptop, for instance – in just a few bullet points? The ideal prospect will want to read about every last feature – that’s simply their demeanor.

Let’s take a different, broader product. Pizza, for example. It’s absolutely fantastic that major pizza chains allow you to order pizza online using landing pages, and I truly hope that the best pizza in the Twin Cities will not only begin doing so soon – but call TopRank Online Marketing immediately to provide their site with the treatment their pie deserves.

“Managing PPC for Multiple Clients” had for me the pleasure of being a “slow-burn” of a session at SES Chicago.

For those unfamiliar with a term I may or may not have created, it means that it did not leave an immediately strong impression on me, until I later was fortunate enough to review the notes I had taken.

The session, moderated by the always exceptional Kevin Ryan featured a panel of:

• Joe Rosza, President of SEO Columbus
• Matt Naeger, VP & General Counsel for Impaqt
• Christopher Upkes, Director of Agency Business Development for Adapt Technologies
• Craig Macdonald, VP of Marketing for Alliances & Product Management

So what was is it that resonated with me most about this session upon further reflection?

According to ComScore, more than $9.3 billion has been spent online during the season-to-date, marking a 17-percent gain versus the corresponding days last year. Online retail spending was strong on both Thanksgiving Day (up 29 percent to $272 million) and “Black Friday” (up 22 percent to $531 million), outpacing the season-to-date growth rate.

With all that holiday spending online, ecommerce web sites had better make sure their landing pages are lean, mean converting machines. That’s why it may make sense to attend an upcoming teleseminar from Marketing Sherpa and Marketo (a M&O client) on  Wednesday, December 12, 2007, 2-3pm Eastern, 11-12pm Pacific “New Research: Practical Tips on How to Lift Conversion Response” on landing page best practices. The event is free and you can sign up here.

Editor’s note: On occasion we reach out to people in the search marketing industry we’ve come to know and respect with a request to contribute. Today’s contribution comes from Microsoft’s adCenter Community Manager – Europe, Mel Carson. Mel’s job is to support, educate & evangelize through the adCenter Blog, industry forums, and to speak about adCenter at conferences such as SMX, SES, Pubcon and others. Mel writes his own blog at DigiTales & Other Stories.

This post tells a personal tale of getting involved with Microsoft at the beginning of adCenter’s deployment to the paid search marketing world along with some good examples of unique adCenter features and why Mel thinks it’s great working for Microsoft.

Raise conversions by 55% you say? That’s what Marketing Sherpa says in the promo copy for their new Landing Page Handbook. One of the most popular posts we’ve ever had on Online Marketing Blog was the 10 Landing Page Tips by Jon Miller of Marketo. That’s why I think this new report from Marketing Sherpa may be of interest.

You can spend a lot of time testing and fine tuning landing pages on your own from scratch, but in many cases, it makes a lot of sense to get a bit of a head start. This guide is about both the art and science of landing page creation and optimization.

Editor’s Note: I am excited to introduce the next in our series of guest articles from IBM Distinguished Engineer Mike Moran.

The credentials list on Mike is a mile long including 20+ years experience in search technology, co-author of the best selling book “Search Engine Marketing Inc” as well as his recent book, “Do It Wrong Quickly“, 4 patents on search and retrieval technology, a sought after speaker at SES, DMA and AMA events and a great blogger with Biznology. Even though he’s one of the busiest people I’ve ever known, Mike stole some free time on a plane to write this post on the difficulties of search marketing for readers of Online Marketing Blog.

Editor’s Note: The next in our series of guest posts from SEM professionals comes from Jon Miller, VP of Marketing at Marketo. Marketo is a client of TopRank Online Marketing and provides B2B marketing automation software in the form of pay per click management, landing page optimization and integration with salesforce.com.

With Jon’s B2B software marketing expertise, excellent work both on his blog Modern B2B Marketing and as a contributor on Search Engine Land, I asked if he could write up a guide for search marketers that would provide actionable advice for readers on the topic of landing pages.

Perhaps the largest difference between business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) pay-per-click is that the post-click goal for most B2B marketers is to capture a lead, not make a sale. This means that B2B companies must focus on converting clicks into leads as much as they focus on getting clicks in the first place.