Every webmaster/affiliate/merchant sees getting clicks through paid listings as a major challenge. The issue is: you have a lot to say, but the constraints of editorial rules and limited text space cause frustration.

You also want the RIGHT type of click. Choose your keywords or headline poorly and the wrong audience shows up. That wastes money as the opportunity of conversion is slim to none.

This session focused on ways to get the RIGHT clicks to your site via PPC.

Moderator: Allan Dick, Vintage Tub & Bath
Speakers: Brad Geddes, LocalLaunch.com, Vic Drabicky, Range Online Media, Mona Elesseily, Page Zero Media

Mona Elesseily from Page Zero Media opened by saying there are some things you should keep in mind when you focus on ad copy. In order to test well, you need to create a good foundation and in order to do that, you need to create killer ad copy.

A good idea is to look at what your competitors are doing. You should also try to have a good grasp of your unique selling proposition (USP): what distinguishes you from your competitors. You need to create compelling ad copy that jumps out at the audience.

I find these types of statements more harmful than helpful. Giving blanket statements without giving resources to improve is not helping anyone. Of course you need to write killer ad copy, but most webmasters want to know how to do this.

Going after your USP is not enough. You have to figure out what the prospects need, and finding out is most often done by surveying instead of guessing. I will be upfront and state that doing a survey is one of the most difficult tasks and is extremely time consuming, and I’m not even an expert at it. Knowing the right questions, how many questions, and in what order is a science.

Getting the right information will allow you then to have the correct USP and you will be able to put together “Points of Difference” that actually matter to the prospect.

Competitive Analysis:
- Ad Copy “Free Shipping” Example. 3 of 5 in her example use that. In that case, it may be worth testing alternative shipping offers especially around busy seasons like Christmas. That can yield significant increases in conversions.
- Test, test, and test.

There wasn’t any “competitive analysis” given in this section. Of the five examples that she gave, three of them referenced “Free Shipping”. While Free Shipping is a great way to close the sale, it isn’t the only way. If you give five examples, it is best to either show five different examples, or five examples of the same thing.

Ad Copy – best practices:
- Cater ads to different buyer’s needs:
Test the following: price (state it in ads), price vs. no price might work too.; information that reassures buyers (i.e. official site or 24/7 phone support); time sensitivity or a deal ending soon encourages prospect to buy sooner than later.
- The ad copy should be appropriate “in feel” to the industry category. Sometimes you can’t do “Need Thermal Oxidizers?” Try “Get Thermal Oxidizers”
- Consider the “buy cycle” – for terms like financial planning, financial planner, financial plans: try -
Financial Planning Services
Long term growth with a
margin of safety. Try this quiz.
www.bank.com

I ran a test for the exact ad as stated above. It performed poorly. I’m actually an affiliate in this space and discussed it with the owner of the financial planning company. His thoughts were right on target. Quizes are poor in the financial planning industry, calculators are better. Changing the description to: “Calculate your long term growth including a margin of safety.” There were 8 times more inquiries with the calculator approach than with the quiz approach. The test was given side-by-side over a five hour period, however, each page had just over 300 uniques each.

Multivariate Testing: uses mathematical formula and algorithms to test many things at the same time. Using advanced statistical methods, you can test a few ads. A large number of ads is impossible to do.

Good prices vs. great prices
Same-day shipping vs. fast shipping
www vs. non-www

If you put certain ad copy on the first line and others on the second line, you may put “ship same day, order today” – you might see different impacts. Try it on the first line instead.

You can’t really divorce ad copy from landing pages. Adding some completely remapped pages helps yield better conversions. Simply displaying features and benefits to a page can raise conversions for specific products. Don’t be complacent in your landing page – keep tweaking.

Testing in multivariate testing:
- Headlines
- Offers
- Buy words – try, get, etc.
- URLs with www vs. URLs without
- URLs with a subdomain versus without
- Different landing pages

She referenced a free tool to use, but the URL that she gave was either incorrect, or it has been taken off-line.

Brad Geddes discussed Dynamic Keyword Insertion (DKI).

Why DKI?

• Put keywords in the ad copy to make it more “clickable”.
• Building ad copy keywords.
• Great for part numbers and testing.
• It can lead to a higher clickthrough rates.
• DKI can target the ad to a particular user.

How DKI works on Google:
Syntax: {KeyWord: Default Text}
Default text is what displays if the keyword cannot be inserted.
Default text is displayed if the ad copy line exceeds allowed character limits.

Benefit: You can test DKI anywhere in your ad.

With Google, however, you can use different capitalization techniques to see what shows up in the ad copy. For example:

{KeyWord: Default Text}
{Keyword: Default Text}
{KeyWORD: Default Text}

But the order of keywords in an ad group matters. Someone might search for “plasma tv sony” and it will look funny if that comes up in your ad copy. Keep that in mind.

DKI and Expanded broad match: Google AdWords inserts what the search query matches to – not the user’s query (e.g. query is “homes for sale”, but your keywords are “condo sale” or “townhouse sale” – that’s what will show up).

Personally, I feel that Broad Match is just a bad idea in PPC and is the “lazy way” to get traffic to your site.

Yahoo! DKI also offers this functionality. Yahoo! doesn’t control the casing from the insertion of the keyword, so be mindful of that. They have something called “alternate text” which allows you to specify exactly what you want to show.

Microsoft came along and took DKI to a brand new level. There are three different ways to insert keywords automatically. There’s a drop-down box, a parameter system, and text entry. This is one area that Microsoft has done well in.

Tip: Use the Help link in adCenter. It has useful tools.

Be aware of your ads. Use competitive research because if everyone is using DKI, there’s less effectiveness. Always be aware of how your ad stands out. Check out different geographies.

DKI best uses:

• Helps bring a 1-to-1 relationship between keyword and ad copy.
• Saves time on very large keyword campaigns.
• If all ads look the same, test in the 2nd or 3rd line of the ad copy.

Vic Drabicky discussed using creative to maximize campaign success.

Example: Before father’s day: Ad copy that says “Don’t Forget Dad!”

5 steps to improving search and creative results
1. Maximize creative to your campaign goals.
2. Maximize creative around your business ebbs and flows (seasonality) – target a month before, not a week before. Holiday stuff should be started in mid-October instead of mid-November.
3. Target your creative to your customers and locations = GeoTarget
4. Effective search branding must be done creatively.
5. The goal may not to get every click, but to get every profitable click.

I felt the last presentation was very weak. Not a lot of information to put to task. It seems to be more “theory” than fact.

Moderator:Allan Dick, Vintage Tub & Bath
Speakers: Nigel Ravenhill, Scanalert
Bryan Eisenberg, Future Now, Inc.

Note: In looking at the list and I haven’t heard any of the speakers before, nor are their companies in a space that would place them as being qualified to speak on this subject. You would think that getting some high profile affiliates would make more sense.

Nigel was up and did a plug for his company and then went through a test of “Trust”:

• Ran A/B Split tests with marked versus unmarked sites
• Used 30 day cookie
• Conversions Tracked
• Captured: cookie type, date, date and time of sale, order key and IP address
• Ran 140 tests
• Average delay from cookie to purchase was >19h hours

What affected the delay to make it 19 hours?

• Competitive scope
• Price
• Demographics
• Brand recognition
• Number of competitors online

The more competitive the market, the delay is longer because the user is shopping for the best price.

This is not true. I have conducted survey after survey after survey and when you get down to why people really buy, price is down the list … usually in the 3-6 slot. Even in competitive markets, trust is always going to be a top three factor, and will win every time over price.

Tips to Influence the conversion rate and retention by:

• Appearing to be real
• Publish hours
• Eliminate garage startup stories
• Don’t wait until shopping cart to give comfort
• Extending cookies to 30 days will help populate returning carts

These are solid tips. Let me go a bit further. According to my testing, having testimonials, or giving a virtual “assurance” that you are who you say you are increases conversion rates. Personally, I would extend the cookie to 90 days. And if you ship product, offer a free shipping option or at least give an “estimate” of shipping before they get to the checkout page. Nothing is more annoying than buying a CD for $7.95 and getting hit with $14.50 for shipping and I live in the same state. In fact, “high shipping or late to disclose shipping rates” is the always in the top three of reasons people abandon a shopping cart. Do things different, make a solid offer for free shipping or offer a low shipping rate. You will see higher conversions.

Make related products easy to find

• Use search box to refine search
• Meaningful site navigation
• Related products cross-sell
• Bestsellers list

Amazon does a great job in this area and one that you would be wise to mimic if you have the same type of cross-selling options.

Help the customers choose:

• Employ a variety of things to bring comfort – customer service, FAQs
• Answer customer questions
• Help the customers share information
• Enhance the shopping experience with Buy Now changes and save cart type options.

I find Best Buy’s site lacking in this area. It is difficult to get real questions answered and what is on the site isn’t always in the store, and what is in the store isn’t always on-line. It is frustrating. Or worse, the product is on-line and it is in the store, but the on-line price is cheaper. They won’t match it in the store. I hate that.

Conlusion

• Find reports at www.scanalert.com
• If you make it difficult to find what the user wants – they will leave.
• Marketing Experiments tested cart recapture through email and had a 240% conversion rate on those recaptured carts.
• If you can capture the email, you can resend the cart to entice the purchase.

Everyone knows that if the process is difficult, the buyer will leave. However, there is a huge range in the definition of “difficult” based on the buyer’s ability. What is difficult for one is easy for another. No system is perfect, and it is best that you appeal to your biggest audience, rather than change something that affects 3% of your visitors.

Recapturing Abandoned Cart via email is done by using multiple screens at checkout. The first screen asks for name and email address. If you abandon your cart before completed checkout, you will be emailed to ask you to come back and complete the cart for an added incentive, which is usually free shipping. While Neil tested this and realized a 240% increase, which is great, I have tested it as well and found out that people would abandon the cart on purpose to see if an offer was made. They would then use the incentive to purchase at a lower price. According to exit surveys, the figures of “recapture” weren’t as impressive as there were enough buyers who played the system that made it a wash.

While it is great to capture additional sales, look at the offer and make sure that it does not eat into your profit margin, or it could spell trouble for your bottom line.

Brian is now up.

In 1880′s Frederick Winslow Taylor began studying usability and how to work more efficiently.
His focus was about users and tools. People think about the web as a tool but it’s really a communication vehicle.

Web analytics is great for understanding that something happened on your site.

• What happened?
• Why did it happen?
• When did it happen?
• It’s like CSI – you need to analyze data and see what happened.

The tools tell you what happened – funnel reports, exit reports, complex scenarios. Your focus should be to figure out how that information can help you make money. Either you are going to help them get what they want or you don’t. It is as simple as that.

Eisenberg’s Hierarchy of Conversion

• Must be functional – can I take an order or process a lead.
• Can people get to it – do they get 404′s, is it readable for users with disabilities?
• It is usable, useful and not too clunky we’ll still buy.
• Intuitiveness, is it engaging, does it feel right? Only 26% of visitors report an e-commerce experience as engaging.
• Persuasion, is it convincing?

Buyer Behavior and Modeling

• Which type of person are you and what stage are you on in the buying cycle.
• Determine angles of approach and then help people buy by solving their problems.
• The name of the game is Opportunity Cost
• Visitors are ready to spend money and you’re not taking it.
• Testing alone is not going to solve conversion problems. You have to know what you’re testing.

That last comment that you must know what you are testing is vital. Too many webmasters don’t know what they are testing or they test the wrong areas. This is all about Opportunity Cost and I cannot believe that Economics 101, which I thought was the biggest waste of my time in college, would come back and be beneficial. Adam Smith was a pretty smart guy. I mean, here we are in the Internet Age and his “invisible hand” theory is still relevant.

Look at your page from various perspectives – buying a movie.

• Spontaneous – will these types of users find what they want immediately?
• Humanistics – is the data structured for this type of user.
• Methodicals – can you search/buy by genre?
• Competitives – search by actor and/or title.

As David Bullock will tell you, tweaking and testing your page for better conversions is hard work. So what do people do instead? They invest in traffic, focus on ranking, do SEO. What happens? Conversion rates drop and they don’t know why.

Study the funnel and know what causes users to fall out.

• Users can be forced out by friction – you scared them away!
• You’ve paid for the traffic and then scared them away.

You need to define the conversion goals. Then you need to give them what they want. And finally, you need to actually do the creative testing. Either A/B split or multivariate tests.

What to Do?

• Product images tell a story, use them to sell the product.
• Give them the detail they need.
• Don’t use standard photography, be different.
• B2B needs merchandising too.
• Persuade people to read what they download
• Pictures appeal to different personality types.
• Test headlines and hyperlinks.
• Spend a lot of time testing headlines.
• Test using fractions instead of percentages – it worked but we don’t know why
• Test sell versus customer focused words.
• Get them to click on the call to action.

Other recommendations:

• Don’t copy people who you think know what they’re doing.
• Add assurances at the point of action – return policy, customer service information, guaranteed response times. Lands End does a nice job at this.
• Do what people expect from you – don’t hide what people need to do.
• Watch what you say on your buttons – test “Buy Now”, “Add to Cart” etc.
• Think small – keep the pages lean and mean. Optimize images.

I disagree with not following the best in the market. That is the basis behind my Kitchen Table Copy technique (coming soon).

Does your site stink?

• Are you giving your customer the scent of relevancy?
• When keywords appeared on the page, the page was 70% more successful.
• A page either has the content the user is looking for or has links to that content.
• The reason they leave is because you did not give them what they were looking for.

Drop-offs
- 1 Click 9.56%
- 2 Clicks 54.6%
- 3 Clicks – 16.56%
- Only left with 20% of the people you initially attracted

Figure it out:
- Who is your customer
- What action do you want them to take
- Cover the motivations of each type of buyer

Guidelines
- Images tell a story
- Test headlines and copy
- Calls to action
- Point of action Assurances
- Make is obvious what you want them to do
- Don’t make them wait

Conclusion:
Put as many assurances into your landing page as possible to establish credibility. If you cannot establish the credibility, they will not convert.

Kevin Ryan, Heather Lloyd-Martin, Jill Whalen

The first topic for Heather was SEO Copywriting and an example was AmsterdamEscape.com. The problem presented was that the site:

• Had bad duplicate content issues
• Was banned from Google for 18 months
• Had to spend $4,000 a month in AdWords for traffic

Solution:

• Explained to client that content is king
• Got them to build the site with this as main focus
• Created pages such as “Do’s and Dont’s when visiting Amsterdam”

Once they were back in the index, they starting ranking for terms such as “Amsterdam nightlife” and “Amsterdam apartments” through their new content pages. The new traffic allowed the site to scale back on PPC and save $48,000 a year.

That is a great example, but as I do research on the information I can’t substantiate any of it. The Alexa ranking is 357k which tells me that the site gets less than 100 uniques a day. All of my “spy” tools show no history of advertising in AdWords … even in the local flavor of Google.

The recommendations were as follows:

• Do a site: command and see what the Titles and Descriptions are for each page.
• All Titles should be unique.
• Don’t “Keyword Stuff” the Titles.
• Make sure the Landing Page is relevant based on the Title/Search term.
• The Keyword Phrase(s) should appear in the body text naturally.
• Create “Stubby Content” which is about 250 words.
• Don’t pack your keywords into the first paragraph of your content.
• Target the keyword phrase in the Page Title, Heading and Subheading.

Here is what I would recommend instead:

• The site command is fine, but you can’t detect duplicate or near duplicate Titles that way. You have to be able to sort the list. That is why Leslie Rohde’s OptiSpider is my favorite product in detecting problems with Titles.
• Not keyword stuffing your Title seems to be a no-brainer, but too many SEOs still do it. I say it all the time, treat the Title like an ad and you will be far better off.
• I come from the camp of testing keywords through PPC BEFORE optimizing them … so I make sure they convert. That’s pretty important information to know. In Google AdWords, in order for me to receive an EXCELLENT score, my page must be relevant to the keyword I am targeting, it must be in the Title, in the Headline, and throughout the body of the text. Hmmm. Sounds like SEO to me. So, instead of “blindly” trying to figure out what Google wants, all I need to do is run an AdWords campaign, which will benefit me anyway, and in the end I will have a highly optimized page for organic search.
• “Stubby Content” is old … today what converts visitors is giving them the content they need in order to feel good enough to buy. How many words is that? Every market is different, so you must test. I would run four tests. 125, 250, 350 and 500 words (of course these numbers don’t need to be exact).
• You can pack your keywords anyway you want as long as the text is compelling and it works. For example, your first paragraph might be a bulleted list with all of your keyword phrases. There isn’t any wrong with doing that. When in doubt, do what converts best.

The next round of tips:

If your content isn’t converting, don’t just edit the content, consider rewriting it from scratch. That way, you will be better able to integrate the keywords that you are working with.

Before you invest in a content rewrite, it would be helpful to know if the content is what is failing. Stay tuned in the membership section as I will have a good list to run through to verify that what you are about to change is part of the problem and not part of the solution.

Look at adding in marketing messages that will stand out from other results on a search page. Think to yourself “why would someone click on my listing?”. Don’t necessarily target your company name, it’s something that you should test. Your product may convert better than your brand.

This is great advise and should be followed closely. You must place yourself in your prospect’s shoes and realize that your listing is surrounded by competitors. You must stand out, and just ranking #1 isn’t enough.

If you have copywriters in-house, consider giving them training on how to write with SEO in mind. If you don’t have copywriters, outsource the work or look at hiring either a specialist SEO content writer or train a new employee to do so.

Be careful here. This can create a bigger problem. Training copywriters with SEO in mind can either be a huge success or a bitter failure. It takes time and they must have confidence in you to change their way of writing. Having results in hand to show how a slight change resulted in a huge gain must be in your possession. If you are just speaking “in theory” with no real results to back up your claims, you voice will fall on deaf ears and you may be “ambushed” by your co-workers and out of a job in the very near future.

Outsourcing is another major issue as you are giving out your company data to a non-bonded person or company. It is far better to get permission to change the Page Titles and Descriptions first, and then go after getting a content box added to each page with “related search terms” to be inputted. Doing these three things should allow for the rankings to move up enough to get the attention of the right people.

Jill was up next and pointed out that Search Engines can’t read content in graphics or flash, you can use ALT attributes although they’re not as valuable as real text. PDFs are indexable, so publish any documents and press released that are not currently linked to on your website.

It is always good to hear the “old standbys” … Graphics and Flash can’t be read by search engines … well, Flash can be indexed, just do a search for “Loading, Loading, Loading …” (hat tip to Mike Grehan who I first heard say that at Webmaster World in 2005 – it still makes me laugh). Great info on ALT text as well, make it focused on the graphic only, don’t keyword stuff. See How Important is ALT Text in SEO that I was quoted in two years ago. The info is still relevant today.

As for PDFs, I don’t like them to be indexed. To me, content in PDFs should be blocked from searches. They should be “print” versions of articles or content that is downloaded. I have never been able to monetize search traffic that lands on a PDF. All it does is drive up the bandwidth bill.

Remember that users come first, make sure that everything makes sense to real people and not just purposely sprinkled with keywords. Be descriptive in links and page titles e.g. “Our B2B Marketing Services” rather than “Our Services”. Optimize for key terms and not for keywords, because ranking top for single word terms is not possible for most people. Don’t rely on stemming (search engines considering word variations as the same), use plurals, past tenses and other similes in your website. Consider words with multiple spellings, don’t use both spelling form on the same page – include variations deeper within the site.

Users will always come first. I will say it again. Use the terms that convert visitors into buyers. Ignore all the hype of KEI and other keyword research myths. What matters most is making that cash register ring. Who cares how many people walk through the doors of the store. It is how many are walking out with product instead of empty handed.

The goal is to sell. And always keep your eye on the goal.

I recently completed a massive ten part series on building links … the proper way. I am going to post a quick summary of things that you can do in order to build links to your home page and sub pages that are completely “white hat”. In other words, links that Google will love and (hopefully) cherish.

• Submit to the Yahoo! Directory ($299.00 fee)
• Submit to DMOZ and perform sacrifices to the “ODP God” to get your site listed (think Local listing here)
• Contact people you know, business partners both new and old, friends, customers, neighbors, family, suppliers, etc. and ask for a link or agree on a reciprocal link. Now, before you do this, understand that each request needs to be hand crafted and give a benefit to them. State your “points of difference” and why linking to you would be worthwhile for their visitors. Note: Just don’t agree to be listed on a page with dozens of other non-related companies or one that looks, breathes, and walks like a link farm.
• Find good quality sites with great content and link to them. While this won’t always happen, if your site has good traffic, they should see some referral traffic from you. The good webmasters out there will look at their log files, see the referral traffic and then give you a link. You’re benefiting your visitors anyway, and this can also open the door to a good cross-relationship with another webmaster.
• Write articles and submit them to the main article databases and social networking sites.
• Do a review of a product or service (as a testimonial) and send it to the company. Most will include it on their site and include a link to your site. If the testimonial is real good you could wind up on the home page.
• Write and submit a press release of value. Emphasis on VALUE.
• Look at link building as a way to build your traffic from referrals instead of as an increase in PageRank. Focusing just on PageRank is marketing with blinders on. Look at the big picture. If the search engines went away tomorrow how would people find sites? Word of mouth? Yes. Advertising? Yes. Recommendations (links) from other sites? Bingo.

What NOT to do

• Don’t send out a mass email telling people how cool your site is and for them to link to it. No one cares and you are spamming whether you care to admit to it or not.
• Don’t write content just to write content. Have a purpose.
• Beware of “link baiting” and ensure your purpose is clear and ethical.

There you go … some good tips for you and link building for your site. While I realize that most will complain about writing content that it is hard and takes a lot of time, the payoff is huge. If you can’t write, find someone who does, and make sure they can write close to the style in which you talk … as it will lend to stronger followings and higher conversions.