April 10, 2012 – The focus at this month’s SEMpdx event was pay-per-click ads.  Ryan Campbell, from Amplify Interactive, guided us through a few quick and easy ways to set up a campaign on Google’s Display Network.  Tips included selecting 5-20 keywords per ad group and allowing Google to identify relevant websites for a larger net of possibilities.  After the campaign is launched and bids have been adjusted (based on the average cpc), check the automatic placements report.  If you sort by cost, you can go back through to find which websites are costing you money but not offering a return.  Once you have the data to know what’s working, you can promote the high performing sites to your managed placement campaign.

Steve Burnett, from ethology, drilled in on successful remarketing tactics.  The first thing to do is to organize and plan your strategy.  Carefully identifying your audience segmentation will lead to effective retargeting that won’t annoy your viewers.  Review your visitor flow chart and conversion funnel, and tailor your ads accordingly so they speak to the audience’s intent.  For example, are you building a brand awareness ad or post-conversion ad?  Customize the ads and refresh your messages frequently.  Other optimization tips included remarketing to people who’ve abandoned the shopping cart while in the middle of placing an order and adjusting the campaign’s control settings, such as reach and frequency, to reduce creative fatigue.

The evening ended with Anvil Media’s Jason Kane sharing his tips on landing page optimization.  Getting back to the basics, he reminded us not to overcomplicate things.  Keep a simple layout that’s easy to understand, using descriptive headlines and clear calls to action.  The ultimate goal of the landing page is to remove any friction.  One way of doing this is to include trust elements, especially if you’re new to the viewer.  Also take care in choosing page colors.  Jason closed by emphasizing the importance of testing and optimizing regularly.  Never discount anything without testing it first.

3 thoughts on “PPC & Landing Pages

  1. Any chance we might get the slides from Jason, Ryan and Steve’s presentations? Each made me say why did I think display, re-marketing, and landing pages were so hard. And each had slides I wanted to take a closer look at. Thanks for the summary.

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