Online Marketing Blog

Tim Ash is a marketing machine. He writes a blog, contributes to Search Engine Watch, hosts a weekly show on WebmasterRadio.fm, is author of the book “Landing Page Optimization”, speaks at numerous conferences and is the chair of the upcoming Conversion Conference in May.

Oh, and he also runs SiteTuners, a successful landing page optimization consulting business and has launched a new tool called AttentionWizard that offers eye tracking “without the eyes”.

Tim has worked with American Express, Sony Music, American Honda, Coach, COMP USA and many other major brands.

“Landing page testing is the best accelerator of your business that you have available.”

Tim is a very smart and very nice guy who took a few rare moments of time to answer a few questions about measuring social media ROI, budgets for testing, common mistakes, tips, tools and how he stays current in such a fast paced and changing field.

Continuing the day’s trend, I attended another landing page-related session to round out Day Two of SES San Jose. The Expert Roundtable brought together four ‘knights’ of landing page optimization, armed with their tips and tricks to achieving the ‘holy grail’ of pay per click ads: Landing Page Utopia.

Moderator Ron Belanger, Vice President of Agency Development at Yahoo! Search Marketing, helmed this team of experts. Each speaker had their own unique ideas as to what achieves the most effective landing pages, and I’ve highlighted some of their original ideas and basic tips.

Scott Brinker, President and Chief Technology Officer at Ion Interactive, began the session with a challenge to the typical landing page format. “Landing pages look the same today as they did five years ago,” he observed. Scott offered three ways marketers can move beyond the standard with their landing pages:

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.

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.

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.

UK based e-consultancy holds periodic round tables meetings with agency and client side search marketers to discuss issues in the industry with a report published afterwards. The most recent September report, which highlights a number of search engine industry developments, SEO challenges and tactics motivated me to write this post. Many of the issues in the report are on the minds of in-house and agency marketers world wide.

Here are a few of the issues discussed and my own thoughts as they relate to each with a nice little rant at the end:

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.