The Web Tycoon's blog » Search Engine Marketing

7 Things you Shouldn’t do to your Landing Page When Using Google Adwords

The-Web-Tycoon — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 19:05:27 +0000

The landing page is something very important when using Google Adwords, her you need to catch the attention of the visitor and obtain a conversion. Fortunately, this is something that has been very studied. These are the things you shouldn’t do when building a effective landing page to use Google Adwords:

Asking for Too Much Information

Remember that Google Adwords is likely to slap websites that ask for too much information Only ask for information that is absolutely necessary to complete a certain transaction.

Long forms intimidate people. And when people feel intimidated, they go away. Do not let your forms make for a horrible user experience by putting too many fields on it.

Use too much text, as if people was using Google Adwords to study an encyclopedia.

Nobody cares about your text and your sales copy as much as you do. When it comes to text, think “less is more”. Less text is good for conversion, it’s good for attention, it’s good all around Google Adwords conversions. When you write for your landing page, write in the “inverted pyramid” or newspaper style. Put the most important information first, put it in the headline, then follow it up with details. It’s okay to have lots of details, but you have to segregate them under “more detail” links.

You need not worry about people from Google Adwords not seeing what you want them to see because if you are able to catch their attention and stir-up their curiosity, they will surely try to find out more even without being told to.

Have an unclear call-to-action

As large part of the visitors from Google Adwords will decide in 2 to 3 seconds whether they’re going to stay on your site or not. Your Landing page need to catch the attention to these visitors or the money you spend in Google Adwords will be wasted.

Your call-to-action need to be placed prominently on your landing page, draw people’s attention to it. Make it “call out” to them. Give all the emphasis to it and de-emphasize everything else. Do not drown it by putting highly engaging visual elements or useless clutter on your page.

Having a landing page with Too Many Choices

In the past, putting a lot of stuff in a landing page was a good idea for an Google Adwords campaign because people was very likely to click every banner in the Internet, nowadays this approach is wrong.

Having too many things that are equally emphasized on your landing page diminishes the importance of all.

Not Keeping Your Promises

People doesn’t visit your landing page from nowhere. They are coming from somewhere,like Google Adwords, and they come with a purpose.

they have seen something in that has piqued their interest and urged them to click on the link Google Adwords published to your landing page. So, make sure you are able to match your visitors’ intent or frame of mind as soon as they arrive on your landing page.

Lack of Credibility and Trust

Social proofs, endorsements, and trust marks/symbols will help you earn your visitors’ trust. Place them prominently on your landing page but use them sparingly. Don’t get too carried away as they can easily distract your visitors from Google Adwords.

Visual Distractions

Jaw-dropping and highly engaging visual elements may be cool, but a landing page is not a place on which to show off your visual design prowess. You want to convert traffic driven form Google Adwords

Having too many visual elements on your landing page will cause your visitors to look at the wrong things and, possibly, miss the call-to-action that was intended on the page.

Google Adwords will slap who ignores the nine comandments

The-Web-Tycoon — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 03:20:01 +0000

It is well known that Google hates Spam, and the Google Adwords isn’t a exception. This saved us from finding junk content when we are surfing over the Internet. But this may lead to uncomfortable situations when the anti-Spam crusade of Google hits us.

I’m meaning the so called Slap of Google Adwords, a punitive action that Google takes against advertisers who submit poor quality landing pages, the effects of the slap are basically two:

your ad’s cost-per-click price will increase, sometimes dramatically, there are advertisers who have been slapped, paying over $40 per click.
your ad’s ranking in Google Adwords will go down., most times it will go so down that anybody will find it.

The Google Adwords Slap has been existing for many years, in the past, if a landing page was slapped, you only had to improve it, and change the domain,but since September 2009, the policy of Google against low Quality landing Pages became harder and when you are Slapped, what is most likely to happen is an automated email like this:

“Your Google AdWords account has been suspended due to multiple submissions of poor quality landing pages. We are unable to revoke your account suspension, and we will not accept advertisements from you in the future.”

What Uses Google Adwords to determine the quality of a website?

The high quality of a landing page as well of avoiding suspensions, will increase rankings. The five pillars Google Adwords uses to determine quality are , original content, transparency, navigability, and load time, so a Good landing page must have the following:

be quick to load;
be designed in such a way that it will enable users to easily find what is promised in your ad;
be able to openly declare information about your business;
be a conversion page, or a page where people can purchase and/or obtain the advertised product/offer;
feature unique content that is not found anywhere else on the web, Google hates duplicates;
contain and provide substantial information;
not alter a user’s computer in any way without asking for the user’s permission first;
not request for personal information without a privacy policy and a disclosure;
allow access for unregistered users to part of the content;

Following these 9 comandments you will be more succesful with the Google Adwords.

The Dollar Currency is falling again, and the Euro is now at 1.50

The-Web-Tycoon — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 02:16:54 +0000

The dollar currency fell again this week and this pushed the Euro currency more near to 1.50 dollars. And all this just in the beginning of the Asiatic tour and a debate about the revaluation of the Chinese Yuan currency.

The change of the dollar currency against the rest of the main currencies are getting each time lower, the Euro has risen by another 0.57% to the 1.4988 dollars, very near to 1.50

The British pound currency is also rising, by 0.51% to 1,6762 dollars, the same thing happens with the yen currency, that rose by 0.34% against the dollar.

Japan was precisely one of the attention focuses in the currency exchange market. The Japanese GDP is growing by a 4.8% very more than the expected by analysts. At the same time,the data about the Japanese GDP was featured and began the four days long visit of Barack Obama in the region of Asia Pacific, whose leaders previously agreed to keep the stimulus plans to ensure the exit of the crisis.

USA and China launched new calls to the economic collaboration in a more equilibrate way, and at the same time, the president of the IFM, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, asked China to strengthen the Yuan currency to help improve the global economic situation, at the same time that defended the dollar as the international reference currency.

In front of the expectations around the Asiatic tour of Obama, one of the investment alternatives to the dollar currency, the gold, reached a new historical maximum. In his rally of nearly a 30% in 2009 surpassed the 1133 dollars per Oz.

The feature of the macroeconomic data in the US, did not affect in great measure the value of the dollar currency, an increase better than the expected in retailer sales, by1.4% in October, reaffirmed trust on the recovery of the consumption.

Now people is more inclined to risk, and is leaving the shelter currencies like the Yen, and the reference currency, the dollar.

The Fable of Search Engine Marketing: Google Adwords and the Affiliates.

The-Web-Tycoon — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 00:05:31 +0000

The Affiliation Marketing Using CPC in Search engines, isn’t something new amongst Internet Marketers. Google Adwords, the main leads provider in the world, is used by a lot of affiliates to bring traffic to their Campaigns.

This Game can be very lucrative,because advertisements in the search engines results bring very relevant traffic. For example, If I have a website to sell Wine, I can put an advertisement in Google results for the keyword ”buy wine on-line”, and I will receive people willing to buy from me. What Super affiliates do,is buy a lot of leads . For this reason there are Internet Marketers who can spent $6000 a day to have $300.000 of monthly profits, this is also called Search Engine Marketing or SEM.

The problem is that Google Banned a lot of Adwords accounts and many of these people who was earning hundreds of thousands of dollars a month, suddenly found themselves earning nothing. Google Adwords suspended these accounts without warning and with retroactive effects. The notification was a single E-mail like this:

“Subject: Your AdWords account: Account Suspension

Message:
It’s come to our attention that you have submitted ads that promote Google Money Tree or ads that promote a misrepresented affiliation with Google. Due to multiple complaints from our users and publishers, we’ve made the decision not to accept these ads.

This is a notification that your account has been suspended due to the submission of these ads and your ads will no longer run on Google. Please note that future accounts you open will also be suspended.

As noted in our Terms and Conditions, Google reserves the right to terminate advertisements for any reason. To view our Terms and Conditions, please visit https://adwords.google.com/select/xxxxxxxxxx.

We appreciate your cooperation.

Google Inc. 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway Mountain View, CA 94043

You have received this mandatory email service announcement to update you about important changes to your AdWords product or account.“

You can find more information about this in the official Google Blog

These massive suspensions began in the United States on July of 2009, but some countries are still receiving these e-mails. For example, in Spain some affiliates have been banned this week.

The moral of this story is: Don’t put all your eggs in the same basket. You can have a great twitter account, or a blog in the top ten of Google.; But you must invest in safety and work in other business units, otherwise you might suddenly lose all your work.