Adwords Marketing Blog

Thursday, December 10, 2009

Directly linking from Adwords to a Clickbank sales page

For good quality scores, your landing page must be targeted to your keyword. The Google robots that crawl the landing page determine this. What do they look for?

a domain with all pages relevant to the main topic
keywords in the domain name
keywords in the page name / url of the page
keywords in the title of the page
keywords in the keywords meta tag
keywords in the description meta tag
keywords in the "h1" heading tags on the page
a keyword density of 2-5%

Robots also like content. They don't like html, css, javascript or other code. Robots can't tell html from content in most cases, so lots of the html just dilutes the keyword density. I've had people run their pages through the tools at google.com/webmasters/sitemap, and google tells them the only keywords that google sees ranking highly are html codes!

What is the bottom line? A good sales page often makes a bad landing page for Adwords quality. It's sort of a double edged sword. A good sales page and lots of html, images, javascript, flash scripts, eye catching layouts and colors. A good landing page for adwords has nothing other than content targeted to a single keyword. In other words, a very boring page to look at.

How you find a middle ground between these extremes? Personally I like to use frames or iframes. I use these techniques to insert one page inside of another. So, my outer page is the high quality landing page, while the inner page is the sales page. The robots see the outer page when evaluating the landing page. The customers see the inner sales page when they link to it.

Here is an example of a landing page using frames...

<html>
<head>
<title>KEYWORD</title>
<meta name="description" content="A sentence or two about KEYWORD."></meta>
<meta name="keywords" content="KEYWORD"></meta>
</head>


<frameset rows="100%">
<frame src="INNER PAGE URL"/>
<noframes>
	<body>
	<h1>KEYWORD</h1>

	KEYWORD RELATED CONTENT GOES HERE

	</body>
</noframes>
</frameset>

</html>

The robots will read the "no frames" part of the page. Customers using modern browsers will only see the Inner Page in the frame. This way you give both sides what they want.

I recommend the following instead of direct linking to a clickbank sales page.

Obtain hosting (free or paid) and domain name related to your topic
Create a landing page using the frame technique described. I would optimize it for a single keyword as recommend in my free Adwords guide.
point you Adwords ads to the new landing page.

You should see a boost to your quality scores by doing so.

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Thursday, October 29, 2009

Scheduling Ads To Run At Specific Times During The Day

I recieved this question recently.

I do have a question...right now, my keywords are expensive, and I do not have a huge daily budget to work on. I know the goal is to have your ads running 24/7, but until I can get the keywords down in cost using your strategy....is there a time of day that is better than another to run google ads?

I personally don't schedule ads to run at certain times of the day. Mine run all the time.

Using that feature correctly requires you to have lots of data on clicks and conversions. The idea is that you spot a particular point in the day where you are getting more conversions, then you target that time of day.

If you don't know a specific time to target based on data, then it likely won't help.

The only broad timing decision you could make is if your product or service is geared toward a particular geographic region. For example, suppose your website is geared toward North American consumers. You could elect to run your ads only between 8am EST and 9pm PST which are the prime hours for American consumers to use the internet.

This would prevent your ads from running during prime hours in Europe or India. It might also prevent robots running overnight clicking your ads.

I would recommend controlling your spending with the daily budget. Set your campaign to show ads as quickly as possible, and let them shut off when the daily limit is reached. You can collect data on the clicks you do get and split test to improve your sales copy and get a higher CTR. Eventually that will reduce the CPC and allow your ads to run longer.

In addition, you can also improve your ads and landing pages to increase quality as my guide recommends. That will also lower your CPC.

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Adwords

Thursday, October 15, 2009

How can I get my ad into the first position

I was recently asked the following question.

How can I get my ad into the highlighted green area for the first 3 ads. I consistently rank 1, 2, and 3 but my ad shows up on the right side and never in the highlighted green area.

Try using "position preference". You can set it to only allow ads in the #1 position, which should be the "green area". Adwords will manage the CPC so that your ads appear only in that position. You can limit the daily budget to control costs.

Read more about position preference from Google themselves

http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=36482

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Adwords

Monday, October 05, 2009

What is the acceptable keyword density for a landing page

Google has not released any information regarding acceptable keyword density. But, the accepted theory is that your maximum keyword density is 5%. That means if you have 200 words on your landing page, no more than 10 of them should be the keyword. Five percent is a high density and it's difficult to exceed that mark.

I generally look for a keyword density anywhere between 2% and 5%. That range is assumed to be good for Google SEO and Google Adwords.

I tend to make sure my keyword appears...

in the page url
in the page title
in the meta description and meta keyword tags
in the h1 tags

If I've done all four of the those, I find that I can have naturally written content without concern for keyword density and still get good quality scores.

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Adwords

Saturday, September 26, 2009