The headline is perhaps the most important piece of your landing page. It is the first thing a potential customer sees. It is also the first marketing message your deliver. The goal of the headline capture the visitors attention and compel them to read the rest of your sales copy.

The best way to capture a visitors attention is to demonstrate your landing page is relevant to the search term. If a visitor believes the landing page will satisfy the reason for the search, they are more likely to remain on the page. If you can display the visitors search term in or around your headline, that will convince the customer that you landing page is what they are looking for.

Assuming you only one keyword in your ad group, or at least on a few terms centered around a single keyword, you can put that single keyword on your landing page. If you can incorporate that kewyord into your sales copy, the more likely the visitor will stay.

Adwords Dynamic Keyword Insertion provides a more flexible means of determining the visitors search term. First, you add a querystring parameter to your destination url. The parameter could be named something like "SearchTerm". Then, use Dynamic Keyword Insertion to to supply the value of the parameter.

Dynamic Keyword Insertion will replace the Adwords tokens with the search term the user searched for. This means that the destination url will contain the exact search term. This is more targeted than putting your keyword in the landing page.

Your landing page must be able to generate dynamic content. You want your landing page to check for the SearchTerm parameter in the querystring. If found, display it as your headline or part of it.

This technique will make your landing page more relevant for your users. You should get an increase in conversions.

Eliminate CTR penalties using Adwords placement campaigns. A placement campaign allows you to specify which websites will display your ad. This gives you an opportunity to improve the quality of content network traffic.

Assuming you are familiar with the proposed Adwords strategy, you'll recall that the key to getting low cost per clicks with Adwords is relevance. Relevance is determined by two means. First Adwords checks your keyword, ad and landing page to assign a quality score. The guide discussed in detail how to get a good or great initial quality score.

Second, Google reevaluates the relevance and quality score using the Click Through Rate or CTR. Adwords will assume that your landing page is relevant if consumers click on your ads. So, the more consumers that click on your ads, the higher the quality score you receive. On the other hand, if you have many impressions but a low CTR Adwords will penalize you and lower the quality score. The process is very much like Darwin's natural selection where strong ads are rewarded and weak ads penalized. A half percent CTR is required for maintaining a good quality score. A half percent CTR means one click per every 200 impressions.

There are a few options for an ad that has stopped showing due to a poor CTR.

1) Delete the keyword and ad. Generally this is a good idea because it will keep the poor performing ad from dragging down the entire campaign CTR.

2) Rewrite the sales copy to make it more compelling and increase the CTR. Your ad must still be showing for this to work.

3) Pay a higher cost per click to have the ad appear again.

There is an alternative to the keyword driven campaign that eliminates relevance, the CTR reevaluation and just about any other Adwords penalty you can think of. It's an Adwords placement campaign where you pay per impression. Adwords does not charge you per click. Instead you pay per impression or CPM, which is the number of times your ad is shown.

An Adwords pay per impression campaign doesn't need to track relevance, quality score or CTR. Adwords doesn't care how your ad performs. You will be paying for impressions, not performance. Adwords has shifted the burden of monitoring the performance to you.

You have to track your performance. You don't want to pay for thousands impressions of an ad that doesn't generate clicks. You must be sure you have a compelling ad that generates clicks.

In addition, you can choose which websites will display your ad. This allows you to target a specific audience and market. Generally speaking the content network traffic in Adwords is the lowest quality traffic. This is traffic that doesn't convert well after it has come to your landing page. The content network is Adsense publishers, so you have websites trying to get ad clicks by any means necessary, which results in lower quality traffic than Google Search traffic.

But with the pay per impression campaign, you can specify which websites to advertise on. For example, you can advertise on About,com, which is owned by the New York Times. You can be assured that the Adsense tactics used on About.com will lead to higher quality traffic.

Pay per impression is a viable alternative for getting into a competitive market. If you find that regular Adwords campaign is too competitive, try a placement targeted campaign, either CPM as discussed or a CPC campaign. Again, make sure you have a compelling ad first.

A very common mistake with Google Adwords campaigns can wind up costing you money. Discover what the mistake is and why it's a problem. Learn what you can do to protect yourself.

Beginners should stay away from the Content Network in Google Adwords. When you are just starting out, disable the content network in your PPC campaigns.

Why? The content network is all the websites that belong to Google's Adsense program. While Google is trustworthy, not all of it's Adsense participants are. Some Adsense websites attempt blatant fraud. Just do a search for those who got banned from Adsense. In most all cases folks were banned for cheating Adwords advertisers by clicking ads.

Many other Adsense participants make every attempt to trick visitors into clicking your ad. Google doesn't ban Adsense participants for just being sneaky, Google really only bans fraud. But, sneaky traffic is not going to get you any return for your Adwords spending. For example, two years ago, the hot thing to do on Adsense was place a graphic over the Adsense ad. The graphic was usually in no way related to ad. But, this made the visitor believe the graphic was related to the ad. When the visitor clicked the ad, he or she wound up on your website which had nothing to do with the graphic. In most cases, the visitor is immediately left your website, wasting your money.

Many website exist where Adsense participants make ads look like navigation, attempt to blend ads with content and other tactics to confuse or trick visitors into clicking ads. Adsense publishers are always looking for the next gimmick to increase their Adsense clicks. How motivated is a consumer going to be if they were tricked to your website? The traffic generated by Adsense publishers is of low value.

A basic level content network traffic is less targeted. Google search traffic consists of a consumer actively searching for keywords. Content network traffic consists of consumer browsing other websites and stumbling across your ads.

Unfortunately, as an Adwords advertiser this is all at your expense. Now you know why the content network traffic is low quality, so go turn it off.

At intermediate and advanced levels you can use the content network. Placement targeting allows you to display ads on specific websites. If you choose respectable website, you can get good quality traffic.

You can also choose use the content network as is. Adwords allows you to separate search network bids and content network bids. When you enable the content network, enable separate bids as well. Never pay more than 10 cents a click for the content network.

Did you know that when Google separated bids for the search and content networks it ended the Adsense gold rush? Back in 2005, Google allowed Adwords advertisers to separate bids. Previously, an Adwords advertiser got only one bid for both. Highly competitive markets forced higher bids. Adsense publishers would target high payout keyword in the hopes of making a dollar or two a click. Since the change, even highly competitive keywords pay much less on the content network.

Adwords began calculating Quality Scores for ads for each consumer search in the later half of 2008. Part of the new calculation is page load time. You'll learn What is page load time, how does it affect your Quality Score and what can you do to improve it.

What does page load time mean?

Page load time is the time it takes for your page to render after it is requested. The life cycle of a page is straight forward.

1) The request for the page is made

2) The server will performing any server side processing, like dynamically generating content or accessing a database. When the page is completely constructed, it will proceed to the next step. NOTE: Static HTML pages do not have server side rendering, only PHP, JSP or ASP.NET pages have server side processing.

3) The server begins transmitting the response over the internet

4) The client computer receives the response

5) The client begins rendering the response in a browser window. Additional requests are made for flash scripts, graphics and javascript.

6) When the page is completely rendered, and all other requests are complete, the page has loaded.

Adwords must really be measuring the time from the request until the response is read. I doubt Google can actually be attempting to time to render the page n the client, and make the child request for graphics and so forth. Google would have to add some javascript code to the page in order to know when the client side rendering was complete. I seriously doubt they would do this.

How does it affect your Quality Score?

Google has this to say about why it considers page load time.

Based on this paragraph it seems Google is trying to crack down Advertisers using server side redirects and interstitial/ad pages. A server side redirect would be when the destination url is requested, the server side scripting language redirects the request to another url. This really performs two request, and thus increases the page load time. An interstitial page is an advertisement page that is shown (briefly) before the content, and may be achieved with a redirect.

It also seems that Google is saying if your page takes to much to respond, it's likely doing something sneaky.

What can you do to improve your page load time?

1) Optimize your server side scripting
If you do use PHP, JSP or ASP.NET, make sure your server side code is optimized. This is especially true when using a database. You need to optimize both your database, and your code for speed.

2) Get dedicated web hosting
Most cheap web hosting happens on a shared server. That means that many websites from many website authors are all on the same server. All of these websites compete for server resources, like bandwidth and memory. Heavy traffic to some other website on a shared server can slow your page load time. A dedicated server is one where only your website(s) resides at. It's more expensive, but you get dedicated resources.

3) Compress the size of your page
A web page is really just a file. That file must be transmitted from your server to the client computer over the internet. If you can decrease the size of the file, the file will transmit faster. You can compress your pages by removing whitespace. You can remove any unncessary HTML tags. You can use relative urls instead of absolute urls. Do anything to decrease the size for the file.

4) Lose the Flash Animation
Flash animation is generally rendered on the client side, so it may not factor into the Page Load time. But then again it may. Either way, Flash animation tends to be slow, so get rid of it for the sake of your customers. Sure it looks great, but you can't afford to lose sales because nobody waits around for the Flash animation load.

5) Strip out unnecessary elements from the page
Again, elements rendering on the client may not affect the page load time. Then again they just might. Remove any unnecessary graphics or images. These take a long time to load. Minimize javascript or CSS includes. Additional requests need to made for these files, so keep it to a minimum.

6) Optimize your page
As a final effort, you can optimize the HTML itself. For example, table HTML tags tend to render slower than a CSS/Div layout. If you have tables, you might consider switching to a CSS/Div layout.

You earn money when a visitor converts. Until your visitors convert you are spending money. No matter what your conversion is, either sell a product or collect and email address, you want a visitor to take that action. Your landing page must convince the visitor to convert. The following are several ways which you can increase the conversions of your landing page.

•   Do research.
Build your landing to speak to your ideal visitor. Keep everything the page geared toward that ideal visitor. A landing page trying to capture a broad spectrum of visitor attention is destined to get a lower conversion rate.

•   The headline is important.
Your landing page headline is perhaps the most important marketing message your landing page can have. You can be guaranteed that almost every visitor will read your headline, even if they read nothing else. Grab their attention with the headline.

•   Match the landing page to your AdWords Ad.
Having your keyword in the landing page headline will get the visitors attention. It will tell the visitor the page is relevant to what they searched for. This will increase you chances of the visitor remaining on your page and reading the rest of your sales copy, and converting.

You can use Adwords Dynamic Keyword Insertion to pass the search term to your landing page as a querystring parameter. This will allow a dynamically generated landing page to use the visitors search term in the headline and sales copy.

•   Give the visitor only one option, the option to convert.
Remove any navigation links, outbound links and advertisments from your landing page. Make sure the visitor doesn't get distracted by some other link or message. You want to them to convert, and only convert. This means keep your message to a single page.

•   Remove unecessary graphics or features.
Again, you don't want to distract potential customers from your message. Get rid unneeded graphics, CSS or javascripts. Keep your message simple and focused. Removing unecessary elements should also increase the page loading time. You don't want to lose a potential conversion because your page was too slow to load.

•   Give the visitor every opportunity to convert.
Don't have only one conversion link or form at the bottom of your page. Make sure your visitor doesn't have to search for the conversion opportunity. Popup windows and DHTML windows provide great ways to attract attention and convert.

•   Use Testimonials
Consumers like Testimonials from third parties. For some visitors, Testimonials may be more persuasive than your sales copy. When collecting testimonials you can write the copy yourself and simply ask the Testimonial giver to agree with it.