Posts Tagged ‘landing page design’
Best Web and Landing Page Design Tips of 2009
Wednesday, April 14th, 2010Discover beautiful site designs inspired by nature, mind-blowing microsites, and beautiful icon sets. Find out how to make landing pages work harder and increase conversion rates. Learn which attributes to double-check before launching a new site, mortal web design sins to avoid, and how to create a custom 404 error page. Yes, you’ll see all of this and more here in the best website and landing page design tips and techniques of the last year.
Thesis Tutorial – Customizing the 404 Page by SugarRae
Rae Hoffman provides step-by-step instructions for creating a custom 404 error page in the WordPress Thesis template, and includes a link to 100 awesome and creative 404 error pages for inspiration.
15 Essential Checks Before Launching Your Website by Smashing Magazine
Lee Munroe offers a helpful to-do list before launching a new website, taking care of tasks such as optimizing titles and meta tags, proofreading, checking the site in different browsers, double-checking all links and installing analytics.
Must-have features your website is missing by iMedia Connection
Reid Carr recommends a succinct value proposition, the ability to compare your offerings with competitors, content-sharing capability, personalization and other features to make your website work harder.
149 Mortal Sins That Will Send Your Site to Web Design Hell by Web Pages That Suck
Vincent Flanders supplies an outstanding checklist to help avoid having a bad website, such as “Logo is not on the top of every page and clicking it doesn’t lead to the home page,” “Our site uses cheap clip art instead of high-quality web graphics” and “The content is not understandable by humans and is full of marketing-speak, or jargon, or unexplained acronyms.”
10 Great B-to-B Sites by BtoB Magazine
Karen J. Bannan give examples of 10 excellent b2b websites that meet the test of providing “visitors clear, concise product and company information, reflecting a company’s brand consistently and engaging users in a conversation—whether it’s about an industry trend or about how to take the next step toward a making a purchase.”
20 Incredible Illustrative Site Designs Inspired by Nature by Design Reviver
A display of “20 Incredible Illustrative Site Designs Inspired by Nature that are sure to get your creative juices flowing” including Studio 7 Designs, Viget Labs and meomi.
10 mind-blowing microsites by iMedia Connection
Fred Brown enumerates six differences between corporate websites and microsites (e.g. scope, clutter and budget), then shares 10 outstanding microsite designs from companies like Taser and Red Bull.
50 (fresh) Beautiful and High-quality Free Icon Sets by Dzine Blog
50 very cool icon sets for a variety of purposes from food and music to antiques and electronics.
Simple fixes for floundering websites by iMedia Connection
Linda Eskin advises businesses to “take a little time first to handle simple issues that make such a big difference to your customers” then provides six steps to “help you discover how your new site can better serve your customers, and therefore your business,” such as listening to your customers, getting your whole team involved and testing everything.
10 Easy Ways to Optimize Your PPC Landing Pages & Increase Conversions by PPC Hero
10 common but often overlooked tips for increasing land page conversions, including using minimal navigation, keeping important information above the fold, and keeping your contact form as short as possible.
5 ways to make your site’s contact form work harder by iMedia Connection
Noting that “forms are often the first step in creating the ever-elusive long-term relationship with potential customers,” Chris Lucas shares tips for making landing page contact forms as effective as possible.
Search Engine Marketing (SEM) Best Practices
Sunday, February 7th, 2010Search engine marketing (SEM) can be a powerful lead generation source, or a complete waste of money. B2B marketers often get less from their SEM programs than possible by overlooking basic but critical steps. Here are some best practices to optimize your results from SEM campaigns:
1. Determine your budget: while there is no hard-and-fast rule for this, there are a number of factors that will affect the size of the budget required to optimize your return from search marketing:
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Number of keywords—more keywords means a higher budget. - Time-of-day and days-of-week display—running a campaign 24/7 will require a higher budget than a business-hours-only campaign.
- Geographic display—a global campaign needs a higher budget than one limited to one or a few countries.
- Search-only or search plus content sites—running a campaign across both search engines and partner content sites requires a higher budget than a campaign focused on search alone.
- The type of product or service you offer—as a general rule, products or services that are inexpensive, have only one decision-maker, and are either tactical (B2B) or impulse (B2C) purchases will benefit most from an aggressive search marketing campaign. Those that are big ticket, involve multiple decision makers, and are strategic (B2B) or infrequently purchased (B2C) generally see somewhat lower conversion rates from SEM campaigns, but can still be valuable for lead generation, using an incentive for response such as a thought leadership white paper or research report.
- Your goals—how many leads or sales are you planning to drive from search marketing? Higher goals require a larger budget.
2. Keyword / Key Phrase Development: look at multiple sources—your existing site content, competitors’ websites, industry trade publications, relevant blogs, and the keyword suggestion tool in Google AdWords—to develop your long list of key word and phrases to use in your SEM campaign. You can afford to go a little overboard here, as you only pay for actual clicks. Key words and phrases that get few impressions or a low conversion rate can be culled later.
3. Divide your keywords / phrases into logical groups: keep the number of groups manageable, but ideally you’ll end up with 30 or fewer keyword search terms per group—60 terms as an absolute maximum.
4. Write your ads. Both Google and Yahoo frown on the use of shorthand (such as “GR8” for “great”), excessive punctuation (FREE!!!) and superlatives (“best,” “leader,” etc.). So, keep your verbiage humble—but compelling. For example, “the affordable option” or the most specific functional benefit you can factually tout.
For headlines, you’ll increase your click-through rate by using variable headlines, where the term the searcher actually used appears as the title of your ad. The syntax for this, on both Google and Yahoo, is {KeyWord: your service} where “keyword” is the term your prospect actually searched on, and “your service” is the default term to use in the ad if the search phrase is too long to serve as an ad headline.
5. Set your campaign parameters—geography, time/day and search/content. Both Google and Yahoo provide campaign settings pages where you specify these various parameters for your campaign.
First, determine your geographic coverage: do you want your ads displayed to a global audience, or just one or a few countries?
Second, set the time and day criteria for your ad display. For global campaigns, time needs to be set for 24-hour display. For localized campaigns, you may want to limit display hours, but set your ranges broadly—few people work 8-5 anymore, and both B2B and B2C prospects may well be searching in the early morning or late evening hours.
Third, decide if you want your ads to display only on the search engines or across their content partner networks as well (this blog is an example of a Google content partner—notice the relevant ads displayed at the top and bottom of this page). Content partner sites tend to deliver lower click-through rates than search, but can still be a valuable part of your campaign. For aggressive campaigns, content sites should definitely be included; for more limited or test campaigns, search alone may be the better setting. If you’re uncertain, start your campaign with search, then expand to the content network once your keywords and messages are optimized. You’ll need to develop different ads for the content network with compelling static headlines to catch the attention of readers who aren’t necessarily seeking your content on network sites as they are on search.
6. Develop your landing pages. Logically, you may want a different landing page for each key term group. It’s amazing how many Google and Yahoo ads (still!) simply send clickers to a site’s home page. Unless your home page is spectacularly well-designed, visitors will wonder, “What am I supposed to do now?” Best practice is to send them to landing page that explains why you are absolutely the best vendor on earth relative to the key term group they came from, and then give them a clear call to action (“contact us for more information;” “download our white paper;” etc.).
7. Consider your “incentive for response.” A commonly used item is a white paper; visitors are far more likely to sign up to download or receive something than to simply fill out a form to get “more information”—from experience, about 10 times more likely. Research reports, webinar registrations, contests, surveys and newsletter signups can also be used as incentives.
8. Implement conversion tracking. Both Google and Yahoo provide conversion tracking code for your landing pages and instructions on how to implement this. Ultimately, the goal of SEM is to produce either leads or sales, not just clicks, so conversion tracking is a critical component of your search marketing campaigns. Without it, you’re just paying for traffic, with no way to measure the ROI of your SEM campaigns.
9. Launch your campaign and analyze the results. Neither Google nor Yahoo provide real-time statistics; there is a lag of several hours in their reporting, so it will take a few days to get a usable picture of what’s happening with your campaign. Analyze results weekly for at least the first six to eight weeks of your program. When analyzing results, look for both which keywords are generating the highest number of clicks as well as the highest conversion rate. Remember the 80/20 rule: 20% of your keywords are likely to generate 80% of your clicks. Start by focusing on improving your results for these high-value keywords, and optimize on less-frequently searched terms later.
10. Optimize your keyword bids. The top three ads displayed get the highest click-through rates (CTR), but are also the most expensive positions. The bottom two ads (positions 7 and 
get the second-highest CTR. To optimize your budget, bid for the top three position on terms where you get the highest conversion rate (regardless of CTR). For terms with a high CTR but low conversion, bid for the bottom three first page spots (positions 6-8). It’s unlikely that you’ll have terms that generate a lot of clicks with no conversions, but if you do—drop these ASAP, as they are just a waste of your money.
11. Test alternative ad copy. Write at least two different ads that point to the same landing page, then in Google AdWords and Yahoo Sponsored Search, turn on ad optimization so that your more effective ads are being shown more frequently. After 2-3 weeks, check performance; if one ad is clearly generating higher CTR than the other, delete the lower-performing ad and replace it with a new one to test.
12. Test alternative landing pages. Once your ads are optimized (i.e., you have two ads performing about equally well), point each to a different landing page. Test differing types of copy, amounts of copy, contact form / no contact form, and different offers. Test until you have one that clearly outperforms alternatives at converting visitors to leads.
13. Unless your goal is an immediate online sale, implement appropriate lead follow-up programs. “Warm” leads (someone who completes a “contact us for more information” form) can—and are likely expecting to—be followed up with a (relative prompt) phone call from sales. “Cool” leads (e.g., visitors who download a white paper) should be followed up with by email, with phone calls to those who haven’t opted out of your messages after two mailings.
14. Finally, optimize your site for natural search based on your ad search terms that generate the highest number of impressions and best conversion rate. Organic search listings typically generate 3-4 times as many clicks as paid ads, so it’s critical whenever possible to have your website rank highly in natural search results for popular ad terms.
Best Search Engine Marketing Tips of 2009, Part 1
Sunday, January 10th, 2010What’s the real optimal cost per lead for your SEM program? How can you improve conversion rates? Keep your search marketing program growing? Assure you that aren’t overlooking any important opportunities for optimization?
Discover the answers to these questions and others here in some of the best posts on search engine marketing of last year.
Finding The Optimal Cost-Per-Lead by Search Engine Land
Patricia Hursh makes the case that the lowest cost per lead isn’t always best, as this pursuit can cause marketers to leave leads on the table, so to speak. The goal, as she states it, should be rather on “maximizing lead volume at an acceptable (profitable) cost/lead.”
5 ways to boost your lead conversion rate by iMedia Connection
Noting that 78% of marketers consider generating online leads one of their top priorities, Andreas Roell offers advice on how improve both the quality and quantity of leads, including sharing source information between marketing and sales (as not all leads are created equal) and carefully monitoring the lead generation performance of each source. In another excellent piece from iMedia Connection, 10 tips for extending paid search growth, Noah Elkin and Rick Dalton provide tips on how to increase results from paid search, such as expanding your keyword list, optimizing text ads, carefully segmenting keywords and using the AdWords Search Query report to identify negative keywords to add to campaigns.
9 things you MUST know before you start any conversion rate optimization by Search Engine People
Though this post is aimed primarily at b2c e-commerce sites, b2b marketers may find a few useful takeaways as well. Khalid Saleh provides helpful tips on how to improve conversion rates such as analyzing your analytics, viewing optimization as a long-term commitment, andstarting optimization during the initial site development process.
Finding Google AdWords Super Converter Keywords by MediaPost Online Media Daily
Laurie Sullivan reports on an online presentation by AdGooroo founder Richard Stokes, in which he explained how to find “super converters”—combinations of keyword phrases, ad copy, and landing pages that align to produce “enormous profits.” Stokes pointed out that “They are nearly impossible to predict,” but explained a formula for identifying them and methods to increase the odds.
Researchers: paid search ads don’t get as many clicks as believed by Econsultancy
Patricio Robles reports on a study which showed that contrary to other research indicating that paid search results get 25-30% of all search query clicks, the actual number is closer to 15%. The study authors admit that because they focused on meta search engine DogPile, the figures may be different for other search engines (such as Google, maybe?). What is clear is that, regardless of the precise figure, a significant majority of clicks go to organic results; therefore, smart marketers will invest in both paid search and organic SEO.
Aaron interviews Ben and Karl from Conversion Rate Experts (CRE) by SEO Book
Aaron Wall talks to Dr. Karl Blanks and Ben Jesson of Conversion Rate Experts about improving conversion rates, the most common mistakes search marketers make, messaging, audience targeting, testing, the role of public relations in the conversion process, generating referrals and more.
Never Get Bored With My PPC Tasks Checklist by PPC People
As Amber writes, “This post is dedicated to all the PPC search advertisers out there who think they have done everything to their PPC account and still can’t get the results they need to meet their goals. Just like any job out there, you can never be bored with your PPC account. There is ALWAYS something you can do to improve your performance.” She goes on to provide 15 tips for areas to check and tweak, such as geotargeting settings, keyword groups, negative keywords, ad text, bids, day-parting, landing page design and more.
