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You spend the time to develop the right keyword list and write very targeted ads to help increase your traffic, click through rate and ultimately quality score. But that is only one piece of the equation – where are you sending those visitors once they click? Your landing page is the first visual introduction to your brand and it should bring a positive experience to the user. To help make sure you are getting the most out of your landing pages, I have put together a list of best practices.

Before optimizing your page, it is important to understand how users see your page. People read a landing page similar to how they would a book or magazine – they scan from left to right, then diagonally across and down the page and then finally back up to the top. That means you need to put your message across the top and the next most important piece on the right. Keeping this basic pattern in mind will help while you take a look at your copy, images and conversion form to help improve your landing page performance.

While these are a list of best practices, there isn’t a sure fire formula that works for everyone. As with all things in PPC, it is important to test variations until you find the right combination that works for you. The Google Website Optimizer tool is a great way to test different pages to see which elements perform best and are contributing to a higher conversion rate.

Make sure your headline is visible and relevant. Headlines should be relevant to the user, convey your key benefit and be located at the top where the user is going to look first. Try to work in your keyword into the headline to help a visitor confirm they clicked on the correct ad and improve your PPC quality score. Ask yourself if the headline reinstates the users potential problem or gives a brief definition of the service/product offering. If yes, then you are on the right track.

People don’t actually read landing pages, they scan. Think about it, when was the last time you read an entire landing page top to bottom? Keep your copy short, sweet and to the point. Give the important facts and experiment with using paragraph form versus a bulleted list of short statements. You might find that a bulleted list performs much better.

Design a clean, simple and visually appealing landing page. A few images can help bring a page to life, but keep images to a minimum. A landing page should lend itself to a quick and simple recognition of the ‘key message’ and should not be confusing. Too many images, callouts or messages create clutter and confuse a user. Keep in mind that visitors have likely been searching through several ads and landing pages before getting to yours, if they don’t quickly see what they are looking for, they are gone. You have 3-6 seconds to get your message across, make sure your visitors doesn’t spend that time trying to focus their eyes.

Strategically position your conversion form on the right. Going back to how people read landing pages, after scanning the headline, a visitor’s eyes are going to move to the right. If you have a conversion form, place it on the right-hand side to follow the behavior. If you have a shopping cart button instead, follow the same logic. Make sure any required fields are marked with an asterisk or similar notation. If you have a phone number field that won’t accept dashes or dots between numbers, explain this and provide an example so people aren’t discouraged if it doesn’t work correctly. They will not try to submit multiple times, so make sure it is as straightforward as possible.

Simplify your conversion form. Cut down the conversion or contact form to as few fields as possible to help minimize the visitor’s perceived risk of submitting information. Do you ever use the telephone number to follow up with customers? If not, don’t make it a required field as you may be funneling out valuable leads by requiring the information. Users consider what information is being requested and how long is it going to take to fill out the form before deciding which action to take next. If users feel you are asking too much based on what they are getting in return, they are gone. Sometimes it is better to get more conversions with less information than to get very few conversions but a complete history and profile on a person. Make sure you weigh what is important for your business strategy and adjust accordingly.

Keep the important stuff above the fold. Headlines, forms, and call to action should all be on the top third of the page in order to help guarantee a visitor sees it. Make sure you prioritize the elements on your page along with your content – if you don’t prioritize it for your user, they will on their own and may take away the wrong message or action.

Tell people what they are getting, in plain English. No one wants to submit personal information unless they are sure they know what they are getting. No matter what you are offering, whether it is a PDF whitepaper download, catalog in the mail or simply a request for a follow-up call, make sure you spell out everything a user is getting prior to them filling out the form. They want to know what the reward is before they hand over their contact info.

Keep quality score in mind along with user experience. Make sure you include keywords on your page to help improve your PPC quality score but also consider load time. Page load time is also a factor in quality score, and you have roughly 3 seconds – any longer and your quality score is likely being impacted. Avoid using flash animation, which can increase your load time and result in usability issues for some users.

Allow people another place to go from there. Include a logo that links to your homepage or other deep links within your site. A visitor may not be ready to commit yet but are still interested – give them an option to learn more about your products or company.

Try different messages, images, layouts and colors to find a combination that gives you the highest conversion rate. You may be surprised what a few simple adjustments can do for the performance of your PPC campaign.

Check out The Adventures of PPC Hero: Heroic Feats of Pay Per Click Management at http://www.ppchero.com/. Copyright © 2007-2010 Hanapin Marketing, LLC.

Negative keywords are important to any PPC campaign as it can help filter unwanted traffic before a user even reaches your landing page. For instance, you are trying to attract people interested in shoes, but you don’t sell red shoes. By adding “red” as one of your negative keywords, you can be sure you are not spending money on clicks from people looking for red sparkly shoes so you have more funds available for those looking for brown loafers.

Google, Yahoo! and Bing allow you to add negative keywords into your account but they each approach it a little differently. Google provides the most options allowing you to specify Broad, Phrase or Exact match negative keywords. Negative keyword match types work a little differently than traditional search terms, so make sure you think through each negative before adding it into your account.

Negative Broad: if used correctly, this can filter out a lot of different variations. If a keyword is Negative Broad, then your ad will not show anytime the entire term is used within a search query. For example, if your negative is video game, your ad will not appear for someone searching for game video or video game deals. BUT know that this will not prevent ads from showing for variations of the word. That means that if you want to exclude both video game and video games (plural version) you need to add in BOTH as negative keywords. Also, Negative Broad match will not restrict ads from showing if someone searches on only one of the words. So if someone searches for board game you will still appear, as the word game on its own is not a negative.

Negative Phrase: this match type works similarly to traditional search terms in that it will exclude the phrase. A negative keyword is designated as phrase match when quotations are used around the phrase. If someone searches for only one of the terms in your phrase, your ad will still appear. For example, if your negative is “fiction novels” and someone searches for history novels, your ad will still appear. This also means that if additional words are used in the search query, such as fiction romance novels, your ad will still appear as fiction and novels are not next to each other in the search query.

Negative Exact: this match type will eliminate very little traffic as it only excludes searches for the exact term(s) in the order they are used. To designate a negative term as Negative Exact, include [ ] around the term. If someone uses any other terms in his or her search, your ads will still appear. For instance if your negative is [green sweater] and someone searches for ladies green sweater your ad will still appear as it does not match the negative term exactly.

The Google AdWords blog has put together this chart as a quick reference of the search queries that would be ruled out depending on your negative match type.

Yahoo! has a similar concept but it is referred to as Excluded Keywords instead of Negative Keywords. In Yahoo! you don’t have the same match type options, so keep in mind that what you add in as an excluded term is essentially a broad match keyword. There is a limit of 500 excluded keywords at the account level and each of the ad groups. You can also add in 1,250 excluded words at the campaign level if you choose.

Bing allows the addition of negative keywords at the campaign, ad group or keyword levels. Know that if you use multiple levels, the keyword-level negatives override those at the ad group and campaign levels and ad group negatives override those at the campaign level. As with Yahoo!, there are restrictions on the number of negatives that can be added in. At the campaign level, the negative keyword limit is 1,022 characters and you are required to place a comma between each keyword. This quickly reduces the number of keywords you can add in, so make sure you are choosing the keywords that will rule out the most traffic. Similar to Yahoo!, you are not able to designate match types so all keywords entered are again broad match.

If you haven’t added negative keywords into your account yet, a good place to start is by running a Search Query Report to review what users are searching on to get to your ads. This will get you started, but the report only shows information for those that have clicked on your ad. Don’t forget you also want to eliminate irrelevant traffic that may not have clicked yet so do a little research to see what other terms people might be using. Also, if you haven’t gone through your negative keyword list in a while, you might want to take some time to review what is currently in the account. As your business changes, negatives aren’t always updated so while terms might have made sense to exclude in the past, they may be relevant now.

Check out The Adventures of PPC Hero: Heroic Feats of Pay Per Click Management at http://www.ppchero.com/. Copyright © 2007-2010 Hanapin Marketing, LLC.

Match types can be tricky, especially when it comes to adding negative match keywords. Negative match keywords (or keyword exclusions) are a very effective way to reduce the number of unqualified clicks on your ad. But negatives can get confusing, and often times a manager will inadvertently add a negative that prevents a targeted keyword from showing ads. To me, Google keyword match types and negative match is pretty straightforward. My confusion settles in when it comes to adding negative keywords in Yahoo.

Recently in one of my Yahoo accounts I launched a campaign with keywords targeting satellite tv terms. However, I did not want my ads show up for a broad search term like tv or satellite. Herein my question: If I add tv and satellite as negatives, will that prevent satellite tv from triggering my ad all together? Before I get to answering this question, here is a quick review of the Yahoo keyword match types. Remember that these are set at the account level within your Yahoo account.

• Standard Match: Search query trigger an ad for an exact match to a keyword. This includes singular or plural variations, and common misspellings.
• Advanced Match: Ads are triggered for a broad range of queries related to a keyword, title, description or web content. This is the default setting in Yahoo.

If you are using Standard Match in Yahoo, it is not necessary to use account exclusions. Your ads will only be served if someone enters the exact keyword you are targeting. Negative keywords (or exclusions) only apply at the account or ad group level when you have your account set to Advanced Match.

Yahoo’s negative keyword feature is not as clear-cut as Google’s negative match type system. You have to be careful of the keywords you add as negatives, because you may be preventing your ads from showing. Back to my example.

If a search query exactly matches to a keyword you are targeting, then your account-excluded keywords will not prevent your ad from showing. In my example, I am targeting satellite tv channels but have tv and satellite as a negatives. If the search query is an exact match to satellite tv channels, my ads will show.

However, a negative keyword can prevent your ads from showing when the search query just matches a keyword phrase. In the same example, I am targeting satellite tv channels and have tv and satellite as a negatives. But the search query is the phrase: best satellite tv channels. Unless I am targeting this exact phrase in my account, my keyword exclusions will prevent my ads from showing.

In this case it would be best to set negative keywords at the ad group level. The terms satellite and tv should only be added as negatives to the ad group that contains the broad satellite tv term. These negative terms are too limiting for longtail search queries like satellite tv channels and best satellite tv channels, so these ad groups do not need negative keywords.

Check out The Adventures of PPC Hero: Heroic Feats of Pay Per Click Management at http://www.ppchero.com/. Copyright © 2007-2009 Hanapin Marketing, LLC.

MSN announced the launch of a new ad preview tool for Bing.com. Instead of typing in your keywords directly into Bing, you can now use the ad preview tool to make sure your ads are showing without affecting the real search results.

Typically, I will get clients that like to type in their keywords into Google, Yahoo and MSN almost every day just to see how their ad looks in the SERPS. Unfortunately, this can cause problems for your account. If you type in a keyword and variations of that keyword too many times, but you’re not clicking on any ads, the search engines will serve up different ads and sometimes not showing your ad at all. They do this because they’re assuming since you haven’t clicked on any ads that what they’re displaying for you aren’t relevant, so they begin to display other ads in hopes that you’ll click on one of those. This typically will cause much confusion on the clients end since their ad doesn’t come up in the SERPS anymore and they want to know why.

Another thing that can happen is if you’re typing in keywords daily just to check your ads, this can drive up your impressions and can lower your click-through rates. A lower click-through rate typically means a lower Quality Score which can drive up your costs.

Of course, Google has the same ad preview tool and what’s nice about that tool is you can provide a link to the tool to your clients so they can check on their ads all day long if they’d like without affecting your click-through rates.

To access the ad preview tool within the MSN interface click on any campaign, and in the upper right hand corner there will be a link for the ‘ad preview tool’.

Once you click on that link, you’ll get to a page that has a large empty white box and a field where you can enter your keyword.

Once you enter your keyword and hit the ‘preview ads’ button your results will be shown as if they would be in bing.com.

The Bing preview tool simply shows you where your position is and what the ad looks like within Bing. This way, you don’t have to type in your keyword in the directly into Bing to get the same information which can cause your click-through rates to decrease.

Check out The Adventures of PPC Hero: Heroic Feats of Pay Per Click Management at http://www.ppchero.com/. Copyright © 2007-2009 Hanapin Marketing, LLC.

As I’m sure you are aware, it’s a new month! Now is the time to kick off your PPC campaigns with a bang. There are a few tasks that you can accomplish quickly in the next day or two that will help improve your performance for the rest for the month.

When optimizing your PPC campaigns, you should always make positive changes all month long. However, you should front-load as many of your tasks toward the beginning of the month as you can. Why? This way, when you make some great changes, your account will feel the effects for the longest amount of time possible.

Here is a list of five tasks you can accomplish quickly to get your month started successfully:

1. Run a keyword report and focus on your top 10 keywords. It’s easy to get caught in the mire of hundreds keywords, especially if you’re managing a robust campaign. For this task, you should look at your most valuable keywords to see how they’re performing and what you can do to improve their performance right now. This can include bids, ad texts, ad group restructuring, negative keywords, etc.
2. Are you testing multiple landing pages? Run a URL report to see if you have any weak performing variations that can be removed. This will also allow you to devote more traffic to your best performing landing pages. This way, you can get those weak landing pages out of rotation to start off your month right.
3. Are you running ads on the Content Network within AdWords? Run a placement performance report and focus on the 3-5 websites with the lowest conversion rate and the highest cost-per-lead (or sale). I am sure there are other sites that may not be performing well, and there are sites that are doing great that you want to specifically target – but for this task, just remove those 3-5 sites that are hindering your performance.
4. There is always room to expand your keyword list. Conduct a quick review of your website to see where you can add at least 1-2 new ad groups. Now, you don’t have to do all the extensive keyword research right now, but can you find a few core terms/phrases that could be expanded upon? You can then do the full research and expansion later in the month.
5. Create new automated reports. Staying on top of your performance is crucial to maintaining your performance. You should create one report that provides the vital stats for your account and have it sent to you daily. Don’t overload this report with data because it will become a hassle to review each morning. Only pull the vital stats you need. This way, when you get into the office, you have an email waiting for you and you can review the previous day’s performance.

Of course, there are many other tasks to complete in any given month when managing a PPC account, but these are a few tasks that can improve your performance quickly. As you complete these tasks I’m sure you’ll see other elements of your campaigns that require attention. You should build this list and get to these tasks ASAP. This way, you’ve jumpstarted your PPC campaign for the month!

Check out The Adventures of PPC Hero: Heroic Feats of Pay Per Click Management at http://www.ppchero.com/. Copyright © 2007-2009 Hanapin Marketing, LLC.

The page views have spoken! Below we have gathered PPC Hero’s four most visited, and hopefully most valuable, articles from June. Whether you’re a new or long-time subscriber you may have missed these insightful and helpful pay-per-click management tips. Enjoy!

• If you’re not using competitive keyword research tools to learn about your competitors’ keywords, you may be missing out on opportunities to expand or further specialize your own keyword list & search engine strategies- and on profit in the process.
• Naturally Bing was big news in June- Andrew describes what, exactly, it may mean for PPC advertisers and how we can ensure that we’re monitoring and managing our accounts correctly in response.
• As Joe says, your keyword list drives your PPC campaign. Those little words determine how many people see your ads! As such of course you need a whole lot of relevant, targeted keywords- and how to discover them? Tools like Google’s Wonder Wheel and the Related Search option can help you find relevant keyword variations you’d never think of on your own.
• A lot of people were perplexed by AdWords’ new conversion tracking metrics- one-per-click, many-per click, what? Joe explains (with examples!) what each means, and how you should be considering each for the purposes of understanding your PPC account’s conversion statistics.

Check out The Adventures of PPC Hero: Heroic Feats of Pay Per Click Management at http://www.ppchero.com/. Copyright © 2007-2009 Hanapin Marketing, LLC.