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| 6 Essential PPC Landing Page Optimizations Posted: 21 Jun 2011 03:28 AM PDT Posted by salario This post was originally in YOUmoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc. Your landing pages aren't converting. Sadly, this is not your customer's fault. It's your job to tell your customers why your product is awesome and you have fewer than five seconds to tell that story. Regardless of whether you're a rookie or veteran marketer, we've assembled the following checklist to help you avoid some of the common pitfalls we see all too often with pay-per-click landing pages. The hope being that you can take some of the recommendations into consideration before you go live with AdWords campaigns of your own. 1) Pre-Populate Cursor – Does your landing page have a form field you want customers to fill out? If it does, a great way to reduce friction, and increase conversion rate, is to pre-populate the cursor into the first field. This might sound like a nit, but in all the tests I've seen run, this seemingly slight difference has had a significant impact on conversion rates. A great example of this in the wild is what eHouseOffers does with their sign up page. 2) Eye Contact – You're driving northbound on I-5 (or whatever interstate you drive in your hometown) and there's an accident in the southbound HOV lane. What do you do? You probably turn your head and look at what everyone else is looking at. This seemingly obvious piece of human behavior is something you shouldn't forget to talk to your designer about on your landing pages. What do I mean? Well, the concept is simple. Think of it as the "Look at what other people are looking at" principle, but essentially what it means is that people will tend to look where the subjects in your hero graphic look, not necessarily at your ad creative.
As the above heatmap shows, landing pages are no different from highway accidents: you look where other people are looking. So, if you have a landing page creative with people in them, why not take a page out of what PayPal does with their landing pages and have your subjects look in the directions of your call to action? 3) Testimonials – Another tactic that is incredibly effective is including customer testimonials on your landing page. There's really no better way to build trust with prospective customers than to have existing customers sing your praises. And though you don't necessarily have to do what Sono Bello Body Contouring does and include the testimonial in the header of your site, you should include testimonials somewhere on your landing page - possibly in the sidebar. 4) Point of Action Assurances – It'd be impossible to create a landing page checklist without referencing Bryan Eisenberg, who was truly one of the first real conversion rate gurus. One of the best tips Eisenberg gives in his book Always be Testing is around the importance of putting trust icons, or "point of action assurances" as he calls them, next to your call-to-action buttons. Put another way, if you put trust icons next to your submit buttons more people will click on them. One of many examples of this principle in action is what Provent Therapy does on their sleep apnea treatment landing pages. And bizarre as it sounds, it is important that these trust icons, which can vary from McAfee Secure logos, to Visa logos, to industry awards, are as close to your call-to-action buttons as possible. Why? Well, because customers will notice these symbols and feel at ease. Strange as it sounds these logos will in fact reinforce trust and increase conversion rates. 5) Match Headline with Intent – Not to be forgotten when considering landing page optimization is Google AdWords quality score. Having a high quality score will not only decrease your cost-per-click, it will also help reduce overall acquisition costs And though quality score is comprised of many parts - including keyword relevance and ad copy - you should always make sure you're getting the most from the headline of your landing page. Specifically, once visitors get to your landing pages, you should make sure you remind them that the site they've landing on is in fact exactly what they a) searched for and b) clicked on in your ad. One startup out of San Francisco who really gets this, and who has seen some early wins from creating targeted landing pages is Red Beacon, which is a site who recently won the TechCrunch 50 that's dedicated to connecting consumers with service professionals. 6) Drive a Single Call-to-Action – One of the most common mistakes we see is people trying to do too much with their landing pages. If you ask visitors to do 55 things, odds are they'll bounce instantaneously. However, if you focus on driving a single action, you're likely to get people to take the action you want. And even though from hosted exchange to great SEO books there's no shortage of sites who implement great simple landing pages, the concept is not to be forgotten. Pick something simple and drive people to take that single action. With landing pages the old adage is incredibly true: less really is more. Ultimately, there is no one size fits all landing page. There are many approaches you can take and some useful gallery sites to get design ideas from, but there's no substitute for understanding the principles of conversion rate optimization and working with a talented designer to give you exactly what you're looking for. And though this is not an exhaustive landing page checklist, hopefully the above examples provide a useful overview of some of the key principles you can apply to your landing pages before you throw too much ad spend at sub-optimal, poorly converting creatives.       |
| Google's Un-Personalized Search. Tools to Hack the Code. Posted: 20 Jun 2011 03:49 PM PDT Posted by Cyrus Shepard Google’s personalized search means nearly every result returned within a browser is altered one way or another. It’s rare that two different people on Earth ever see the exact same set of search results. And Google made sure it’s darned hard to turn off. The rise of personalization has created both winners and losers in the Internet world.
The ubiquitous nature of Google creates a real risk of limiting our worldview. Every new search result starts to look like the search before. Our ideas become isolated and homogenized, like exclusively watching only Fox News or MSNBC, while refusing to consider CNN. As a search marketer, this is particularly vexing when explaining the situation to clients, who often don’t realize that Google personalizes their results. An exchange about rankings often goes like this: Created with Stripgenerator There are times when personalization and localization work well, such as when I’m looking for a pizza restaurant in Seattle. The maddening part is, what if I want to turn it off? There are times when I want unbiased results not based on:
I can’t imagine Google founder Larry Page surfing the web all day with personalized search on. Otherwise, he’d never understand how his own search engine performs. Hey Google, where is the off button? 1. The Google SolutionForget the Google solution. It requires too much effort and renders other Google services useless. To un-personalize results, Google’s outdated instructions require you to perform a inane combination of tasks including:
Using this method, you can’t use other services like Gmail or Calendar without logging back in first. The alternative is no better. Who wants to delete their entire search history? Even then, Google auto-detects your location and serves up localized results. Oh, and you can’t turn this off. More on this later. The “simple” Google solution is to type &pws=0 at the end of your search query, which turns off personalization. This method has the disadvantage of being time consuming and, for beginners, difficult to remember. 2. Yoast Search PluginsPerhaps the most elegant and simple of solutions, the Yoast collection of search plugins works in both Firefox and Internet Explorer. Installation is a snap and each plugin adds “&pws=0” to the end of each Google search query URL automatically. Yoast offers a variety of search options, including plugins for different countries and ones that return results for the past 24 hours. 3. SEOmoz MozBarYes, it's our own creation. The free SEOmoz toolbar for Firefox does a bang-up job of showing non-personalized results. The extra cool thing about this toolbar is how you can create multiple custom search profiles that target country, region or city level searches. If you’re interested in the other 101 functions the MozBar can perform, watch a quick video and download it here. 4. Google GlobalThis quick and easy extension/add-on for Firefox and Chrome de-personalizes search results while creating custom profiles as hyper-local as zip codes and IP addresses! (Go 90120) Download it here. 5. Roll Your OwnIf you don’t like what you see here so far, both Chrome and Firefox make it easy to build your own search profile. To be fair, Chrome makes it a lot easier. Rob Oubsey wrote an excellent post on how to set this up. His instructions are clear and useful. I spent part of a weekend evening learning how to make search plugins for Firefox. The fun here is adding your own name and image. 6. Bonus Points: Dealing with LocalizationIn truth, you can’t remove localization from Google’s search results. But you can make your local area very, very large. Google allows you to set your search area as large as a country. By default, I set mine for the United States to remove any local bias that creeps into my results. The results help me see the broader picture. My only wish is that Google allowed us to set our local setting to “Earth.” It’s coming, my friends. Mark my words.     |
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