When building your landing page it’s easy to forget the important role of images for driving conversions.

If this is your first time building a landing page, you might look at your finished page and realize it looks pretty naked. You might feel you need to use some images so your landing pages looks good.

But before you put random images to fill the white space, please read on.

If you use the wrong image, you might destroy your conversion rate

According to marketer Derek Halpern, using random images on your conversion landing page might distract your visitors from the real purpose of your landing page (which is to convert people).

He cites the recent example of a T mobile landing page which featured a beautiful picture of Catherine Zeta-Jones holding a phone to her ear.

When an older shopper landed on the website she wasn’t interested in Zeta-Jones. She wanted to see if the buttons on the phone were big enough for her to see and use.

The shopper said: “(Zeta-Jones is) a very pretty woman….I just wish I could see the buttons.”

T Mobile broke one of the first rules of landing page creation: make sure every element on your landing page is there for a purpose.

What’s the purpose of your landing page? To convert people into customers.

When designing your landing page, analyze whether each element helps your conversion rate. Assess each word, headline, form, button and image and make sure it serves this singular purpose.

Following are tips for using images to increase conversions on your landing page

Use Images to Make Things Tangible

The T Mobile Wireless story shows a basic human need: people want to see the product they’re considering buying.

When you visit Amazon.com to buy a book, the photo of the book is prominently displayed at the top of the description.

Even books that are sold exclusively as eBooks have an image that represents what the book would look like if a physical version of the book were available.

Marketers promoting eBooks or special reports on their home pages for download employ this method.

For example the Content Marketing Institute promotes its virtual magazine by displaying an image of the magazine as if it were sold on newsstands.

Software companies used to do the same thing. They would feature a virtual image of a software package as it would look like on a store shelf.

However, the trend I’m seeing now is to display how an application looks like on multiple devices.

Intuit uses this very effectively with its QuickBooks website. They show how their accounting software looks like on a wide-screen display and on an iPhone.

Use Images to Engage Our Emotions

Everyone knows that people buy based on emotions, but justify their purchase with logic. It’s why a dad with four kids facing a mid-life crisis will buy a red Corvette.

It’s why the statement “shopping is the best therapy” rings true to so many people.

It’s why we’ve bought so many unnecessary items that are gathering dust in our garage.

Images can help you generate positive emotions that make people want to buy.

Graco, the baby products company that sells strollers, swings and other baby products, employs images very effectively.

They feature images of happy young mothers and smiling babies enjoying a stroller ride or being rocked back and forth.

This creates the positive emotions of providing a comfortable and healthy environment for baby and mother. It tugs on the heartstrings of young couples trying to decide what to buy during pregnancy.

Use Images to Build Trust

One of the biggest barriers to online sales is the issue of trust. Shoppers don’t get the benefit of walking into a physical store to see if you’re a legitimate company.

But online that’s a lot harder.

Can I trust this website with my money?

The conventional wisdom is to use images of real people to generate trust. It’s what TV advertisers have used for years: hire a pretty young actress to use the laundry detergent or vacuum the carpet with the new vacuum cleaner.

But do images of real people work?

Over at Visual Website Optimizer they conducted tests to see how images affect trust. The results were surprising.

They worked with Medalia Art, a website that features art work from Caribbean and Brazilian artists. They conducted an A/B split test to measure the effectiveness of the images of the artists themselves vs. images of their actual art work.

Since the paintings are fairly expensive they don’t sell the art online, but rather after a phone call with the customer. They tested click-throughs to the contact us page instead.

They found the conversion rate on the images of the artists was 17.2 % vs. only 8.8% for images of the artwork. The images of the artists showed an increase in conversion rate of over 95%!

A large number of consultants have taken this lesson to heart. Many online marketers and other consultants find that featuring an image of themselves is a great trust builder.

American marketing icon Chris Brogan, and Mexican marketer Marco Ayuso use images of themselves very effectively. Seeing their friendly faces on their websites helps people decide that this is a trust-worthy site because there’s an actual human behind it.

Use Images to Direct People’s Attention

Sometimes you want to direct people’s attention to the most important part of your page, such as your online form.

Instead of relying exclusively on color, positioning and arrows pointing them in the direction you want them to look, why don’t you try images of people looking in the direction of the element?

Note the use of a pretty model gazing to the upper left of the screen on the online form in the Derek Halpern article.

But you can also use images of people pointing in the direction you want them to go. Farmer’s Insurance employs the image of a fairly well known actor using his hands to point to the “quote” form, while turning his gaze on you, the online visitor.

The effect? It makes you feel like he’s expecting you to click on the quote button.

Make Sure You Use the Right Color Images

Many images are designed exclusively to emphasize or accentuate a section of a landing page. This is the case, for example, with the pricing pages of online services. Many online companies sell three or four different tiers for their subscription service (we have five different subscription levels).

Most of the time they feature one package over the others by emphasizing that package in some way.

Marketing Experiments conducted a test on the pricing page of a company that sells educational resources to health and fitness professionals. The goal was to see how color would affect conversions on the pricing page.

The hypothesis was that color, combined with copy and layout, would make conversions go up. The new landing page featured an image of a pricing matrix with the best value plan emphasized by a different color.

The new landing page saw an increase in conversion rate of 81%!

Use Images Wisely

While often an after-thought, images can help you increase the effectiveness of your landing page.

But you need to think about the purpose of your landing page, and the purpose each image will play towards driving conversions.

And please please please don’t use stock images on your landing page. Stock images are essentially an anti-trust icon. They scream “shoddy” and “unprofessional.”

Use original images whenever you can – and use images with a purpose.

How have you used images effectively? What results have you seen with the use of images? Have you seen an increase in engagement and conversions? Give us your thoughts on the comments section below!

You finally did it. You mastered your landing page software, learned how to design a beautiful sales page when you never designed anything before in your life. You took so much time crafting your copy to emphasize the benefits of your solution.

Your landing page is perfect, and now it’s time to launch.

And then, nothing. Crickets. No sales. No downloads of your free trial. No subscriptions to your mailing list.

What went wrong? There could be a number of things.

Maybe your PPC campaign or content marketing efforts aren’t driving visitors to your landing page.

Or maybe people are reaching your landing page, but they’re quickly hitting the back button because they can’t find anything interesting on your page.

Launching your landing page is only the beginning. Don’t expect that your job is over and that the leads are going to start rolling in. The more likely scenario is that nothing, or not much of anything, is going to happen after you publish your landing page.

The way to a perfect landing page is not in the effort you invested creating it – but in the time you invest testing your landing page.

All the great marketers who are driving 10% or higher conversion rates got there because they tested the hell out of their landing pages. They eventually found the perfect combination of headlines, body copy, offers, calls to action and images that converted the maximum number of customers for their particular product.

How do you test? Glad you asked.

We’ve put together a list of ten tests (or experiments) you should start right now.

1. Test your headline
2. Test your font
3. Test the length of the copy
4. Test your offer
5. Test your call to action
6. Test your sub-headlines and bullets
7. Test your images
8. Test your design
9. Test the placement of the elements
10. Test the price

But before we go into detail about each test, a few important caveats to keep in mind:

• Throw out the conventional wisdom

You may have read dozens of blog posts, eBooks and even courses about internet marketing. Keep this knowledge in mind, but throw it out the window when conducting your tests. Most marketers who test all the time have been surprised – again and again – that the results of their tests show that the conventional wisdom was wrong in their particular case.

• Test One Element at a Time

To know the true reason for an increase (or decrease) in conversions, you have to isolate the cause of the event. To do that you must test one element at a time. Don’t test your headline and your call to action button at the same time. Run one experiment first, like your headline, then run another experiment on your call to action.

• Use an A/B Testing Tool

Use a tool, such as Google Website Optimizer or the Lander A/B testing tool to conduct your tests. They’re both free, and they provide you with very useful reports and data points you can use to measure the results of your experiments.

1. Your Headline

Your headline is probably the most important element of your landing page. It’s what tells your prospects she’s in the right place. It also tells her whether the page is worth visiting or not.

The purpose of the headline, according to Brian Clark, is “to get the first sentence read.”

That’s it. If your prospect doesn’t like what she sees in your headline, she’s not going to go to the rest of the page to find out what your product is all about.

No matter how compelling the rest of your landing page is, if the headline doesn’t convince her to read on, your landing page won’t attract anybody.

Try out short headlines, long headlines, headlines with benefits in them, or headlines with a bit of mystery.

2. Your Font

Believe or not, font matters. There are thousands of different fonts, and a new font is born every day. Since Netscape introduced the <font> tag in 1995, a new industry, the web font industry, was invented.

The reason is simple: fonts matter.

The most common fonts on the web are Arial, Georgia or Tahoma. But it’s not uncommon to find font types you’ve never seen before, such as ‘Neutraface2DisplayTitling’ or ‘Chaparral-pro’.

Font size is important as well, especially considering we live in a world dominated by Smartphones.

Sites like Zeldman.com are taking a mobile first approach and are using large fonts.

Test your fonts.

3. The Length of your Copy

Will your landing page have more or less copy? Contrary to conventional wisdom, some landing pages convert better when their copy is long. Very long. I mean more than 20 pages long.

The landing pages for expensive courses with costs upwards of $2000 come to mind.

Other landing pages contain nothing but a headline and a call-to-action button.

The Dropbox home page is designed as a landing page with zero copy. Kissmetrics has a tiny bit of copy and a video.

What works for you could surprise you, so test the length of your copy.

4. Your Offer

Ok let’s clear up one thing here and now. An offer is not a call-to-action. An offer is an offer. The offer is what your prospects get by visiting your landing page. The call-to-action is the invitation to get your offer.

Big difference.

The offer is probably the second most important element of your landing page, after your headline. In fact the offer is so important that marketer Mark Joyner wrote a complete book about the Irresistible Offer.

(And to clear up some more confusion, your offer is not your product).

If you sell a hosted software application that costs $199/month, you probably won’t be getting a lot of subscribers signing up for your service right away.

Instead, provide them with a preliminary offer: a free trial or a free version of your software (that’s what we at Lander offer).

Your offer could also be a free report, or it could be your entire life’s work for free, as marketing legend Jay Abraham offers. The goal for these last two types of offers are typically to build a mailing list to build a relationship with prospects via email marketing.

Is a free trial your best offer, or should you charge a nominal fee? Will people respond better to the offer of a free report, or an offer of free membership in a site where they can access premium content?

Test your offer.

5. Your Call to Action

The call to action is what gets people to try your offer. It’s what your landing page has been building up to. It’s the focus of your online marketing efforts.

Without a call to action, there is no action.

Your call to action can include a button that says “buy now,” or a form that says “subscribe now.”

Your call to action button could be orange, blue, fire red or green.

Your online form could ask your prospects for a first name and email address, or complete demographic data.

Keep in mind the importance of testing your call to action according to your specific purpose. Do you want as many leads as possible, or do you want only stock-brokers who pull in $500,000 per year?

If you’re looking to prioritize your landing page experiments, I would put headline first and call to action second.

6. Your Sub-Headlines and Bullets

People read differently on the web than they do offline. Most visitors to your landing page will scan the page, which is why it’s important to include many sub-headlines, bullet points and numbered lists in your copy.

You want to write for the scanners as well as the readers.

If the headline gets your copy read, your sub-headlines keep your prospect interested.

Your bullet points and numbered lists give your prospects the 20,000 ft. overview of the points you’re trying to make.

Test the size, color, and wording of your sub-headlines. And don’t worry about your marketing department’s concerns with “branding.” They’ll be horrified if you use different colors or fonts for your copy, headlines or sub-headlines.

But when you show them the statistics about how much better the dark red 24px sub-headline performed, that should keep them quiet.

7. Your Images

Images, like sub-headlines and bulleted lists, play a very important role of communicating to your prospects what your offer is all about.

Images of your product are important, but if you don’t have a product per se there are alternatives.

Images of clients giving testimonials are very helpful.

Make your abstract offer concrete. If your offer is a free eBook or special report, have your graphic designer create an image of a virtual book.

Test the types of images and the placement of the images.

8. The Design of your Landing Page

The first thought of a landing page newbie when designing a landing page is: how can I make my landing page look professional? While that thought is well-intentioned, it is often misplaced.

A professional or even a beautiful looking landing page is pleasing to the eye, and it seems logical it would drive more conversions, but look at Craigslist. Very plain design. Hugely successful website.

You’ll never know until you test. Test the colors of your landing page, calls to action, font, images. Test the width of the body, the padding, the margins. Test the density of elements vs. the amount of white space.

At Lander we’ve opted for a nice, clean, modern design. That works for us. Jay Abraham has a rather gaudy design (my opinion), and that works for him.

9. The Position of your Elements

Related to design, think about where you’ll place your images, copy (and when I say copy, I’m not just referring to body copy, but micro-copy, such as image captions and call to action text, for example), and call to action elements.

Will you place your product image right next to the call to action form, or on the opposite side of the page? Where will you place your testimonials? If you have a long landing page, what images, call-outs and calls to action will you place further down the page, and where?

Test the position of your elements.

10. Price

Finally, if you sell a product, test the price. Think beyond the conventional wisdom. Try a low price vs. a high price. Many marketers who have tested price have been surprised that sales go up when they raise their price.

Also, will you use a rounded number, such as $30, or the old marketing trick of $29.99? What about trying something out of the ordinary, like $28.88?

Parting Words

Armed with your knowledge about testing, you might decide you want to test every single variation of headline, color, design, copy and images you can think of.

Don’t.

Our suggestion is to test only the most obvious differences. Don’t bog yourself down testing an infinite variety of options. The little micro changes you make won’t make that much difference, and you’ll waste your time testing them.

Test two or three of the most obvious options.

We also recommend reading Brian Massey’s book “Your Customer Creation Equation” for a more detailed explanation on experiments you can run on your landing page.

Oh, and happy testing!

We’ve come full circle in this series. You’ve learned how to test and measure your search engine marketing efforts You’ve relied on Google Adwords, Google Places, Yahoo, Bing, and a host of other online spaces to connect with your ideal customer.

But Search Engine Marketing is not complete without conversion.

You now must convert your visitors into paying customers. And even though you may have other goals, such as increasing engagement, or improve your exposure, ultimately your goal is to get paying customers. Or else why are you in business?

So what is conversion anyway?

Conversion in the physical world

Let’s use a real-world example.

If you want to open a shop that sells athletic shoes to young men and women, your first decision is to locate your shop on a street with a lot of foot traffic. Maybe on a busy downtown street or in a mall.

The next thing you want to do is hang a large, obvious sign that clearly states what your store is all about.

Then you’ll probably hang some signs with the brand names of some of the hottest athletic shoe makers, like Adidas and Nike.

Inside the store you display your shoes very nicely so people can easily find what they’re looking for.

You’ll want to staff your store with friendly sales-people who help shoppers find the exact size shoe for them, or the perfect shoe for the type of sport they’re playing.

Finally, you want your sales-person to ask for the sale. They should say something like “would you like me to ring that up for you?” or “can I gift wrap that?”

Then you want your sales-person to take the pair of shoes your customer was looking at to the cash register, ring the order up, take the money, and give the shoes back to the customer, all nicely wrapped up in a beautiful bag with your company’s logo on it.

Each one of the decisions you made when planning your store, from the location all the way to the sale, was designed with one purpose in mind: making the sale. Or, converting your shoppers into buyers.

Conversion Steps

Each step along the path to purchasing one of your athletic shoes was a conversion step.

• Your sign was designed to get the young man or woman to look in the window of your store
• The Nike and Adidas logos were designed to let that young man or woman know: “this is the place where I can find what I’m looking for.”
• Your display was designed to involve your young shopper in the active shopping process: browsing, comparing, selecting
• Your salesperson was hired to help your prospect make a decision and lead her to the cash register, and
• Your check-out counter was designed to make the sale: exchange money for shoes

Now let’s compare this to your online marketing process

• Your online ad or title text + meta description. This is your sign in the front of your store. It’s designed to communicate exactly what you offer prospects, and invite them to “come in” to your store by clicking on the ad or search engine result.
• The design of your landing page and your trust elements. Your landing page should also have logos: logos of the companies who have become your customers, or logos of the brands you sell in your online store. Your landing page should also look professional, enticing and easy to navigate. These all serve as the “trust elements” that let your customers know they’re in the right place. Also, and very important: the words you use on your landing page should match the words on your ad or search engine result. Again, the purpose is to build trust and let your prospects know they’re in the right place.
• The words, organization and clarity of your copy. This serves as the “display” on your landing page. You want to communicate the details of your offer as clearly as possible, and structure the copy so that your prospects can easily find what they’re looking for. You want them involved with what you’re saying so they can quickly browse, compare and decide on what to buy. You achieve this by having clear categories, on-site search, and call-to-action buttons that lead your prospects to the products or information they want.
• Your call-to-actions. At every step of the way you want to move your customer closer to buying your product or calling your sales people. You do this by having call-to-action text and buttons. These are your virtual sales people. You want to get your prospects to the exact category of product they want. You want your prospect to add your product to their shopping cart. Finally, you want your prospect to check-out. You achieve this by prominently displaying the names of each category, by providing a prominent button to add your product to their shopping cart, and by displaying another prominent button to “check out.”

Each one of these steps is a conversion step. At each step you could lose your customer. Your goal at each step is to optimize your conversions so as to increase the number of customers that go from one stage to the next, and eventually buy from you.

Conversion Optimization

On average a website converts two percent of its visitors into customers. But you can make that figure much higher – to ten percent (or more). According to Brian Massey in his book, “Your Customer Creation Equation”: The conversion rate is the number of conversions divided by the number of visitors who come for a given period of time.” In other words, conversion rate equals actions divided by traffic. Increase your conversion rate in one of two ways:

● Increase the number of visitors who take action on your landing page

● Reduce the number of visitors who don’t plan on seriously considering a purchase

But there are many areas that you must optimize. In our recent blog post “A/B Testing for Landing Pages: A Primer,” we discussed the different areas you should optimize:

• The headline: Make your headline as compelling as possible. A headline with a benefit, or a combination of problem/solution is usually the best way to go.
• The body copy: Most of us think of copy as the words written on a page. But copy can also include images and design.
• The call-to-action: Your call-to-action can be a big fat juicy “Buy Now” button, sign-up form or a simple hyper-linked words that says “click here.”
• The online form: If your form is to collect credit card information, you have no choice but to ask for as much information as you need to charge their credit card. Make this form attractive and easy to use. If you’re trying to get people to subscribe to your newsletter or download your white paper, the more information you make your visitors fill out, the lower your conversion rate. Many companies just ask for a first name and email address. If you decide to ask for more information, your conversions may go down, but you also might get a higher quality subscriber. The choice is yours.
• The positioning of the elements: Finally, will you put your call-to-action button in the middle of the page, or just below the body copy? Will you place your body copy to the left of your page and your sign-up form on the right?

To improve the conversion of any of these elements, conduct A/B tests, small experiments in which you change an aspect of each element to see which converts better. Brian Massey said: “We must accept the fact that conversion is first and foremost about measuring results.”

To get results, you don’t want to try something different without a reason. Think of it as a hypothesis. When you make a change, measure whether it improved or decreased your conversion rate.

When testing your hypotheses, be sure to eliminate the things that didn’t work and keep the things that did. Your experience with testing will result in a higher conversion rate and lower marketing costs, and you’ll have mastered conversion, the ultimate goal in your business’s online success.

Your next steps

Well, the inevitable has happened. We’ve reached the end of our series. We’re sad it’s finally ending. But we see this not as an ending, but as a beginning. This Search Engine Marketing series just scratched the surface. There is so much you can learn. But don’t let what you don’t know stop you. A person can go crazy trying to learn more and more, and never implementing anything. We recommend the following:

• Create a search engine marketing plan, with goals that are appropriate for your business
• Study your ideal customer and create your buyer personas
• Research the keywords your ideal customer will use to look for what you’re offering
• Research and decide where to advertise
• Launch your pay-per-click campaign
• Optimize your website and landing pages for search engines
• If you have a retail location, optimize your web presence for local search, including Google Places
• Set up your testing and measuring system
• Make sure each one of your conversion steps will efficiently move your prospect closer to purchasing your product
• Finally, sign up for a free account with Lander so you can create that conversion oriented landing page!

Our tutorial number 2 was great! We really enjoyed it and we hope you did too. But if you couldn’t attend it, we also thought about you so we recapped the best of the Webinar in this post. And the most important, we recorded our Lander Academy so you can watch it whenever you want!

This last Free Lander Tutorial about how to get the most of your Landing Page was divided in three different parts. First we did a Landing Pages overview, so if you had any doubts about them, such as its functions, or the importance for your marketing campaign, now you’re gonna learn why Landing Pages are a must for your Business’ goals.

After that our Account Manager Eric Pfeiffer showed us how to use Lander, how to create a Landing Page, how the Editor works, its integrations, etc. And as a Bonus tip, he also explained the most 5 common mistakes that crush your Landing Pages conversions, so tighten your belt and enjoy our Lander Academy Tutorial!

Overview

Why  Landing Page are so important? Well do you know that after clicking a link from a search engine or pay-per-click ad, visitors look for instant gratification? So if they don’t find what they’re looking for in just a few seconds they will hit the “back” button, even if the item they were looking for was on the page.

Landing pages, as Conversion Scientist Brian Massey States, are “conversion beacons”. They help the impatient website visitor hone in on exactly what she wants by providing clear navigation and instructions.

So what can I do with my landing page? A landing page can only cause one of five actions:

• ClickClick
• Buy
• Follow Up
• Tell a Friend
• Learn Something

What is important here is that a Landing Page, is really useful when you’re looking for a specific action, only one action. That means that when you’re building a landing page, you need to think on a specific goal and ask your visitor just for one and only action.

Let’s see a fail Landing Page action

“44% of clicks for B2B companies marketing campaigns are directed to the business homepage, not a special landing page”

What does it mean? Well that means that you’re losing conversions, but why? Because when you direct your visitors to your homepage you increase the chances to lose them, because they have some many options to do, and if they don’t find the benefit or the specific action they’re looking for, you will lost them. So you have to think about your visitor, send them to a specific Landing Page if you want to achieve your goals.

So landing pages can help you:

• With your impatient visitors finding what they want immediately
  
• Reducing confusion so your visitors can make quick decisions in your favor.
• Showing your visitors with tunnel vision find what they’re looking for instead of missing something because it’s in the wrong place.
• Helping scanners understand what the page is about by providing short, crisp, bold copy, attractive graphics and direct calls-to-action.
• Giving your visitors what they want, and direct them to do what you want them to do.

Lander Tutorial

Now that you know why a Landing Page is so important, and how you can use it for your Campaign, lets see how Lander can help you.

First our Account Manager explained how to use the Editor, he showed us how easy is to edit your Landing Page with our Drag and Drop, and how to create CTAs and forms just in seconds and how to include them in your landing page in seconds. Also in this Lander Academy you learned how to run A/B Tests and optimize for better conversions.

But let’s see the Webinar talk by itself, watch it here!

Bonus Tips

So you know why use Landing Pages, and how to build them. Now it’s time to learn some good tips, about common mistakes that crushed your Landing Pages Conversions. Keep this tips always in mind when you’re building your Landing Pages because this can make the difference between a rockstar Landing Page and very sad one.

1. Blowing the headline: The first thing your visitors are gonna see in your Landing Page is your headline, so take all the time you need to think a headline that make the visitors stay and convert!
2. Asking for more than one thing: Sometimes we heard that is better to give your visitors many options, so they can choose whatever they want. Well when you’re building Landing Pages that concept couldn’t be more wrong! As we said before you have to ask for just one and specific action to your visitor.
3. Ignoring basic aesthetics: When you’re designing your Landing Page think about your audience, use the fronts, colors and visual that are tailored with them and with the action you desire.
4. Having the call-to-action below the page fold: Do you know that only the half of the people that land on your page is gonna see below the page fold? What that is means? You need to focus on the most important information up the page fold, for example never include your Call to Action below the page fold.
5. Not targeting the landing page directly to your intended audience: Your Landing Page must focus on your audience, you need to customize and personalize your content. Never choose a general message because you’re gonna lose your audience’s interests. Try to think as your audience would and design the landing page to capture their attention and to convince them to take an action.

Stay Tuned!

We hope you enjoyed our Lander Academy, if you have doubts, or you want to see something different in our next Lander Tutorial please write us, or let us a comment here! If you want to start building landing pages create your account in Lander for free, and see how easy can be!

Your meticulous planning based on your knowledge of internet marketing best practices will fail you when your Search Engine Marketing campaign sees the light of day.

This is a sad but true fact. But it’s also liberating.

It means you’re free to test new theories and implement new ideas, and see if they work or not.

Let’s Tackle Vanity Metrics

Page views. Unique visitors. Number of pages per visit. Average visit duration. None of this matters. These are vanity metrics that make you feel good if they go up, and make you feel bad if they go down. You can get whiplash following the ups and downs of your daily vanity analytics numbers.

The problem with vanity metrics is they don’t tell you how your SEM campaign is doing. They don’t tell you if:

• The right people are coming to your site
• They are engaged by your content
• They sign up for your mailing list, online demo, or click the “contact us” link
• They purchase your products

To know any of these important pieces of information, you need to focus on the right metrics.

We previously spoke about setting goals for your SEM campaign. Now you’ve got to put your goals into a practical system where you can track, measure and test these goals in order to improve your SEM campaign’s performance.

Your Hypothesis

You first must determine what you’ll measure and what you’ll test. It’s impossible to measure something when you don’t know what to measure, so you’ve got to do what scientists have been doing for years: develop a hypothesis.

Your hypothesis is what you believe will happen as a result of your SEM efforts, and it’s a little more complicated than customers clicking on your ad, falling in love with your product, and buying it.

B2B Scenario

Suppose you’re running the SEM campaign for a B2B software company that sells software and services that run into the $100,000′s, your path to purchase might be:

• Prospect sees an ad for your white paper on CIO.com
• They click on your ad, download the white paper, and click “yes” to receiving your newsletter
• A week later, your prospect receives an email from your company inviting him to a webinar expanding on the subject of the white paper
• Your prospect clicks on the link to register for the webinar
• Then he attends the webinar by logging on to the webinar software
• Finally, your prospect decides to contact your company, and clicks on the link provided at the end of the webinar, taking him to your “contact us” page

B2C Scenario

The scenario would be very different if you’re running an SEM campaign for a new pair of Nike Mercurial Vapor IX iD soccer cleats. Your path to purchase might be:

• Prospect sees an ad for these sweet new shoes on TV and decides to look for it on the internet
• Prospect Google’s it, sees your PPC ad and clicks on it
• The prospect lands on the product page, reads the reviews, sees a video, and adds the Vapor IX iD’s to the shopping cart
• The prospect then looks around for better deals, but can’t find a better deal than yours
• Prospect comes back to your page, goes back to his shopping cart, and executes the purchase

To come up with a hypothesis for your own product, take a little bit of time to think about and document the particular path to purchase for your product.

And your path may not even be to purchase anything – it may be to increase the number of subscribers to your newsletter, or to reach 100,000 likes on your Facebook page.

Putting Together Your Hypothesis

Now you have to be a little creative. Think about the scenarios I mentioned above, and then think about your particular product and how your path to sales would look like.

Answering these questions might be helpful:

• What is your target market? Who is your target persona?
• What are their typical online behaviors? What are their favorite websites and social networks? How much time to they spend online?
• Do they access the web from a desktop or laptop computer from work, or are they primarily a mobile user accessing the web while she’s in class at university?
• Do they subscribe to newsletters?
• Are they impulse buyers, or do they have to make a decision with a committee?
• Is your product sold online, at a retail location, or through a complex B2B sales process?
• What other questions can you add to this list?

To help you build your hypothesis it would be valuable to consider Brian Massey’s Core Conversion Marketing Scenarios

The three scenarios that make the most sense from the point of view of your SEM campaign are the E-Commerce pattern, the Considered Purchase pattern, and the Site as a Service Pattern.

The E-Commerce Pattern

The E-Commerce pattern applies if you accept payment on your website, the buyer consumes the product you sell offline (think the Nike example above), and you sell more than one item.

The E-Commerce pattern is fairly straightforward. You want your shoppers to come to your website or to your product landing page and purchase your product(s).

The Considered Purchase Pattern

The considered purchase pattern is typical of B2B product or service companies, and involves offerings that require multiple week or month decision time-frames, more than one decision-makers, and a five or six figure price tags.

In this scenario, sell the content, not the product. Focus on building your mailing list to keep in active contact with your prospects. Finally, you should provide different content types for different members of the decision team: product centric for the user, ROI-oriented for the C-level executives and finance folks, and lots of case studies everybody.

The Site as a Service Pattern

The Site as a Service Pattern is exemplified by software-as-a-service offerings (Lander is a perfect example) where you have a product that is consumed online, your prospects can make the decision to buy relatively quickly, and you charge a fee to use your application.

Your path to purchase typically involves driving people to your home page (your home page should be designed as a landing page, and is the prime conversion real estate on your site), a free trial, and then a concerted education and communication campaign, via in-application tutorials and automated email communications, to upgrade users to a purchased version of your application.

So what conversion marketing scenario will you base your hypothesis on?

Measuring your Sales Funnel

Your conversion hypothesis is the design you will use to build your online sales funnel. Your sales funnel will consist of:

• Your online ads
• Your landing pages, blog posts, home page, and product pages
• Your nurturing vehicles, such as your email newsletter
• Your call-to-actions, and
• Your conversion actions

Each of these are steps in your sales or conversion funnel. Each of these steps provides a point at which you can record relevant data, the data that lets you know how you’re doing.

Using Google Analytics or any number of other online measurement tools (for a comprehensive list, read this article), measure how people move from one stage to the next.

Measure:

• The Click Through Rate (CTR) of your PPC ad
• The bounce rate for your landing page
• The conversion for your call-to-action
• The subscription rate for your newsletter
• The download rate on your white paper, case study or special report
• Clicks on your contact us page
• Shopping cart abandonment rate
• Hits to your “thank you page.”

This last measurement is the most important for you if you sell something from your website. It’s referred to as your tripwire (we discuss it in more detail in our blog post “5 Quick Tips to Improve your Adwords Landing Page“).

Google Analytics lets you set up conversion goals and funnels so you can get away from vanity metrics and measure how effective your SEM campaign is in driving sales.

Testing For Success

Finally, you’ve got to test. Or to put it another way, conduct experiments. The reason is simple: if you’ve launched an online marketing campaign before, your initial results will be much worse than you expected. 1-2% conversion rates are typical.

You may be happy with that rate, but it’s sub-optimal, and you can achieve so much more.

Testing will allow you to try alternative versions of your calls-to-action, headlines, body copy, PPC ads, colors, positioning of elements and landing page structure, to see if you can improve the conversion rate at each stage of the funnel.

We discussed A/B testing before, but it’s important to emphasize a few points:

• ABT: Always Be Testing. You should make testing a habit. Always have ongoing tests for your headlines, your calls-to-action, your conversion forms, or any point in your conversion funnel where you might lose a prospect.
• Test one element at a time. To really know what affects your conversion rates at any point in your conversion funnel, test only one element at a time. Test your headline, then test your bullet points, then test the color of your call-to-action button. But don’t test them all in the same test.
• Don’t cut your test short. Many marketers make the mistake of cutting their tests short. Don’t make that mistake yourself. You need statistically significant data. Let your tests run long enough to collect the data you need to make a decision about either replacing your current conversion element or keeping it.

Your next steps

You’re pretty close to becoming an SEM expert. You know how to:

• Set your SEM goals
• Develop your target personas
• Perform keyword research
• Identify your perfect advertising channel
• Run a pay-per-click campaign
• Optimize your SEO
• Master Google Places and
• Test and measure your way to success.

We’ve got one last tutorial for you: how to optimize your conversions.

So stay tuned for the last hoorah!

A new Lander academy is around the corner!  This time in our Free Webinar, we’re giving a Beginner’s Tutorial  for Creating Landing Pages. This is your chance to learn How to get the most out of your landing pages using Lander, including an easy step by step on how to create them and the best tips and tricks on how to optimize it and improve its results. So Register now for our Free Webinar and start building Landing Pages by yourself in just minutes!

Next Tuesday, April 30th at 1PM CST (click here to see your time)  you’ll have the opportunity to attend at this free one-hour tutorial by our Account Manager Eric Pfeiffer. You’ll learn how to create high-converting landing pages and you’ll see that is not something that takes many hours of work. Our Account Manager will teach you how easy it is to make and customize one with Lander. After this tutorial you’ll be able to try Lander without concerns and see that building Landing Pages is not a Rocket Science!

With this tutorial you are gonna see that you don’t need to be a professional and also it’s not necessary to have a Graphic Designer or a developer behind your back, you won’t have to wait for them anymore, you will learn everything that it takes to make a wonderful Landing Page.

This webinar will show you how to easily create CTAs and forms and how to include them in your landing page in seconds. Also in this Lander Academy you’ll learn how to run A/B Tests and optimize for better conversions.

Eric will show you how simple it is to understand your conversion chart and how your clicks and leads work: you’ll find that’s really easy to check how your landing page is working.

This Lander Academy will also show you  how to use Social Networks to boost response and to include them into your Landing Pages.

And last but not least we’ll teach you how to integrate your landing with your Email, Google Analytics and more. Also we are gonna explain all about how to create a Mobile Version of your Landing Page.

So here’s your chance to stop fighting with landing pages, we’ll show you that it’s easier than you think! Save your seat for this tutorial because in just one hour you’ll learn all these tips:

• How to create a high-converting landing page in minutes
• How to easily include and customize your CTAs and forms.
• Learn how to use Social Networks to boost response.
• How to run an A/B Test and optimize for better conversions.
• Integrations: Email, Google Analytics and more.
• How to create a Mobile version of your landing page.

April 30th is not that far so take this opportunity and register here in our Lander Academy: Tutorial. You can’t miss this occasion to learn everything you thought you’d never know about Landing Pages, you’ll see that Lander is really intuitive to use!

They say location is everything. Well Google Places is one of the most lucrative locations you can establish for your business, and is part of the growing trend towards local search, and even hyper-local search.

Ninety-seven percent of consumers search online for local products and services. Are you there when they need you? If not, read on.

Complete Your Google Places Profile

The first place to start is to set up your Google Places account. Setting up an account only takes five minutes. You’ll feel an iota of excitement when you’re greeted with the message, “Welcome to Google Places for Business!” You’ll be asked to verify your account and you’ll have the option to stay “informed of future releases and other relevant information.” Essentially, to subscribe to the Google Places newsletter. I’d subscribe if I were you, because it’s full of valuable information that can help you in the future.

Be sure to verify your account. When you have a verified account, your business will show up in local listings. You’ll also be allowed to edit your listing. One thing to note is that any edits will undergo a quality check before being updated. Several business days can go by without any changes appearing, and the previous version will continue to be present, so don’t panic if your changes aren’t showing up!

Places (as it’s oven referred to) makes it easy to fill in your profile. It displays a bar that shows how far along you are in the process.

Add your logo, choose your business category, and enter your address, phone number, and hours of operation. Places even encourages you to complete your profile by declaring the information you left out “missing” (i.e. “Missing hours of operation”, “Missing description about your business”). You’ll then be shown a link to “Add it”.

The information you provide enables Google to analyze your business and further assess when it should be listed in Google search results, including Google+, Earth, and Maps. Because your Google+ Local page and Google Places listing are linked, you can manage them simultaneously. Even though Places and Google+ Local are separate entities, any edits you make to your Places listing will automatically apply to your Google+ Local page.

Your Reviews are an Opportunity

Besides providing the means for your business to be found, Google Places serves another purpose: providing critical customer feedback. Seventy-two percent of consumers rely on online reviews, and more than half are likely to visit your business based on a favorable review.

Online reviews are important because they let you know how your business is perceived by your customers. You’ll have the opportunity to interact with them and respond to both positive and negative feedback.

Remember that negative feedback is an opportunity, as well. If you don’t want your response to be on display, offer the customer a chance to personally contact you in order to address the feedback. Your customers will appreciate your accessibility, and learning from your mistakes will only make your business better.

Try Google Offers for Free

Consumers love promotional giveaways, and Google Places offers a coupon generator to drive consumers to your door. After you have verified your authority within the business, your Google Places account will give you access to the coupon generator, known as Google Offers. Google Offers lets you present a promotion to potential and returning customers. The type of offer is your choice, and you determine the length of time it will run. Within hours, you will be ready to receive your first Google Offer from a customer.

When using Google Maps, consumers will find the coupon searching for your type of business via their mobile device. The person has to be located near your business in order to find the offer, but this is an advantage because they can visit you right away.

For example, if somebody is starting a new job in a part of town she’s unfamiliar with, for her first lunch break she might hungrily look up “Mexican Food” on the Google Maps on her Android phone. She’ll see a coupon offer when she clicks on your location, and because you’re only two miles away from her  new  office, she immediately goes to your taqueria to get the three taco special advertised in the coupon.

Where Google Places and Google Maps Come Together

Google Places is also integrated with Google Maps. Establishing a presence on Google Maps gives your business leverage in terms of search results.

• Start by claiming your business on Maps and verifying that your business details are accurate.
• Then perform a search on the Google Maps website. The location of your business is marked by an icon which looks like a red balloon. If you click on the icon, a white box will appear on the screen with your address, phone number, and perhaps a photo.
• If you find that the information needs editing, click “more,” located at the bottom right corner of the white box. A drop down menu will appear, and one of the options is “Edit details.”
• If you’re not on Google Maps, visit the Google Places website and click the link, “Get started for free”. You’ll need to create or sign into your Google account for access. From that point, you simply add your business and confirm that you’re the business owner.
• Anyone can edit your entry if the business isn’t claimed, but you can claim the listing. Google will ask if you are the business owner and a button is provided to “Manage Your Page.”
• When you click on it, you will be asked to verify your business and whether you are its owner. Confirm your official association with the business by either phone or mail.
• Via phone, you’ll receive an automated phone call at the number listed, and by mail, a postcard will be sent to the business address. The phone call and postcard will contain your unique PIN number.

Just as with your Places listing, you want to fill in as much information and details on Maps as possible.

Your knowledge of keyword search from our previous post will come in handy because you’ll recognize the advantage of choosing categories that describe your business. You want to make it as easy as possible for potential customers to find you, and the categories you choose to describe your business will show up in their keyword search.

Your Next Steps

Google Places for Business is a growing source of traffic to local businesses, and is especially valuable as mobile becomes more important.  Your homework today is to go and claim your Google Places location right away.

We hope you found the sixth post of our SEM Guide useful! If you missed previous posts of this Guide, don’t worry you we have all together here!

And stay tuned for our next blog post about Testing and Measuring!

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has come a loooong way.

When blogging started to catch on, around 2006, many people scrambled to learn the dark arts of SEO: meta tags, keyword stuffing, backlink building, and plugging into networks of virtual friends who would share your posts through Digg, StumbleUpon and Delicious.

Those days are gone. Forever.

Google’s Panda and Penguin updates have changed the game for the blackhat SEO artists. As Joe Pulizzi says in this Content Marketing Institute article:

“Search engine optimization (SEO) is an incredibly important top-of-the-funnel tactic. As Google gets smarter, it’s almost impossible to game the system. Today, getting found through search engines has more to do with amazing online storytelling than most anything else.”

This is a relief to most of us who believe in honest, straight forward marketing. But what does it mean for you?

It means you have to produce epic content that people will want to link to and share with their friends and family.

How to produce epic content is a topic for another blog post. But the basic premise is: create content on a regular basis that your consumers or prospects will find extremely valuable. How-tos, tutorials, thought leadership content, industry overviews, and new concepts fit the bill.

Creating product centric content or content that talks all about you and your products does not.

But I digress.

So, is SEO all about creating awesome content? That’s part of it. But there are some steps you have to follow to make sure Google finds your web pages and landing pages, and makes sure the people looking for your products and services find you.

So here for you today are three steps to basic SEO that can help you get found.

1.   Keyword Research

Good SEO always starts with keyword research. You need to identify the words your ideal customers use to search for your product or service before you can optimize for these keywords (to state the obvious).

Always start with the initial words that describe your product or service. For example, if you own a restaurant and brewery, you might start with the keywords “brewery,” “brewpub,” and “craft beer.”

These are your “seed” keywords.

Then you want to dive deeper and start to find different combinations of keywords that your prospects will actually use to find your restaurant/brewery.

When you enter your seed keywords in Google, scroll down to the bottom of the search engine results page (SERP) and you’ll find additional combinations.

With the seed term “brewpub” you’ll get:

• “used brewpub equipment”
• “brewpub finder”
• “starting a brewpub”
• “brewpub equipment”

…and more.

Then you want to look at long-tail keywords. These are longer keywords, usually compound terms composed of three or more words, that are searched less frequently, but have less competition. You can use check your site’s Google Analytics to find the long-tail keywords that actually bring people to your site.

Finally, you want to look at “keyword phrases.” Keyword phrases are the terms people actually use to search for your product. How do you find your keyword phrases? You can find these on Twitter, Facebook, comments on your blog. You can also read emails you get from your customers to get the natural language they use.

Keyword Tools

There are many tools you can use to research the keywords your customers are using. The Google Adwords Keyword Tool is free. You can use it when you open a Google Adwords account, and you don’t even have to have a current Adwords campaign running to use this! It is often all you need to conduct keyword analysis. Bing also offers a free keyword research tool.

There are other valuable tools, but they’ll cost you. They provide more detailed analysis of your keywords. Wordstream, Scribe and Wordtracker come to mind, and new player HitTail focuses on long-tail keywords.

Local Keywords

If your business has a storefront or provides services within a metropolitan area, don’t neglect the hyper-local market. Add regional or local terms to your keywords, such as your state, city, neighborhood and cross-streets.

2.   Use your Keywords Intelligently

If you think I’m going to tell you that you need to add a bunch of keyword “meta-tags” to each page on your website, think again. As noted earlier, SEO has changed. Google’s Panda and Penguin updates rendered obsolete many of the traditional tactics internet marketers used to “game” the system.

Some of the tactics Google is now penalizing are:

• Excessive link-building without regard to quality
• Deceptive doorway pages
• Lots of keyword stuffing
• Publishing lots of meaningless content just to get traffic from search engines

(source: Content Marketing Institute)

“Lots of keyword stuffing.” That means: adding keywords all over your content so that your content doesn’t even flow naturally; adding lots of “meta-tags” to your pages; placing many different keywords in your title; and adding “hidden” keywords (keywords with the same color as your site’s background color, so they remain invisible to your reader, but Google sees it.)

These kinds of shenanigans will make Google very very angry, and it will get you de-optimized. You don’t want that, do you?

Title Tags

Each page has a title tag, but don’t confuse title tag with the title of the page. Your page might have a title, also known as a “headline,” that your visitors see when they hit the page. But your title tag is what shows up on those SERPS.

This is a piece of code that tells Google what your content is about, and it’s probably the most important place for your keywords.

Each of the results on this SERP for “brewpubs” is actually displaying the “Title Tag.” If you want to get into your site’s HTML, it’s the text within the <title></title> tags. However, most content management systems have a way for you customize your title tags so they’re different from the page headline.

Why would you want your title tag and page headline to be different? A headline typically appeals to human emotions.  They’re designed to elicit curiosity.

A title tag should be very clear and straight-forward, as it tells the search engine what the content is supposed to be about.

Body Content

You also want to use your keywords within your content. But be careful: don’t “stuff” keywords all over your page. Make it natural. Write the way people talk. Don’t artificially place keywords all over the place to try to trick Google to list you higher. Google might actually list you lower!

The best way to use keywords in your body copy is to use the keyword phrases you identified earlier. If you did this the right way, the keyword phrases reflect the natural way people talk, so they should fit in quite nicely.

If your pages are product pages, just use the keywords necessary to actually describe your products.

Meta Description

Looking at the SERP image again, the text right below the title is your meta description. Google does not use the meta description to find and categorize your content. It uses it to let human beings see a quick synopsis that describes what that site or page is all about.

Make sure your meta description is short (155 characters or less) and clear. You want to be able to convince visitors to click on your link, not ignore it.

3.   Build Inbound Links

If your site has lots of valuable content that contains the keywords you researched, you’re only halfway there, literally. Google places more emphasis on links than on anything else. Why? Because if sites are linking to your content or website, then you probably provide valuable content or a valuable service, and Google wants to provide consumers with quality, valuable sites.

However, be careful about the kind of inbound links you build. Matt Cutts, who heads up Google’s Anti-Spam team, says Google values hard links, not easy links.

Hard Links vs. Easy Links

Easy links are the results of link-farms, comment spam, and indiscriminate registration with directories that don’t have any traffic. Hard links are links that people actually use. They’re usually from authoritative websites with lots of traffic from loyal readers. “Yes, you want links, but links that are hard to get, that take effort to obtain, that you’ve somehow earned, not “easy links.””

How to get Hard Links

The best way to get hard links is actually not hard at all – if you provide valuable content. Jon Morrow says guest blogging is one of the keys to drive high quality links back to your site.

When you submit your article or blog post, always provide a short biography about yourself. It’s customary to provide a link back to your own website in your bio. This should be a link with your preferred keyword as the anchor text pointing to the particular page you want to be ranked for.

Other than guest blogging, just try to write high quality content that people enjoy and want to share with their friends. You will naturally attract links from sites whose owners like your content.

Your next steps

Doing well in SEO is a long-term proposition. There are no quick fixes.

• Research the keywords your customers actually use to find your product or service
• Write valuable content that people actually want to read, with the proper keywords in the title tags and in the body copy
• Attract links from authoritative sites through legitimate means – attract hard links, not easy links

Eventually, you’ll start to see results from your SEO efforts.

But the series is not over. Next, we’ll cover the mechanics of local search using Google Places. And don’t forget to subscribe to our newsletter so you can get all these posts in your email inbox!

Once you’ve chosen where you will be advertising, it will benefit you to know how the advertising will work. The most common form of online advertising today is Pay-Per-click (PPC) advertising. According to Wikipedia, a PPC campaign is:

“Pay-per-click (PPC) (also called cost per click) is an internet advertising model used to direct traffic to websites, in which advertisers pay the publisher (typically a website owner) when the ad is clicked. Farris have defined it simply as “the amount spent to get an advertisement clicked.”

Google AdWords is one of the most popular choices for a PPC campaign. If you’re concerned about your budget, AdWords allows you to spend as much or as little as you can. You’re not responsible for payment when your ad is displayed; instead, you owe when your ad is clicked. Rates are determined by an automated auction system, and you decide on the maximum amount, or the highest CPC bid, you’d like to spend on each customer that clicks your ad. The higher your bid, the higher your ad’s position on the search results page. Bidding higher increases the chances of your target customers seeing, and therefore, clicking your ad.

You don’t have to be the highest bidder to get results. As long as your ad is highly targeted with relevant keywords, it will gain a substantial Quality Score. Your Quality Score is important because it determines the usefulness of the keywords, ads, and landing page to someone who spots your ad. Google AdWords enables you to calculate your Quality Score for any of your keywords. Other features which assist your relevancy include location, day of the week, and time of day, etc. Although it is a good, measurable method, a PPC campaign does not ensure financial success but is a valuable learning experience for the future. PPC advertising is an experimental medium with which you will test what works and what doesn’t.

Campaigns

In terms of Google AdWords, a campaign encompasses many tools which Google has to offer. A campaign is defined as a “set of ad groups (ads, keywords, and bids) that share a budget, location targeting, and other settings”. An AdWords account isn’t limited to one campaign, and multiple campaigns are actually encouraged. Based on location, budget, distribution settings, language, etc., individual campaigns can target different components. The purpose of an ad campaign is “to organize categories of products or services that you offer.”

AdGroups

As described, AdGroups assist a campaign as a set of keywords, ads, and bids which also play an integral role in how an account is organized. You also choose a bid for each ad group. Google AdWords encourages you to build ad groups for each related product or service in order for keywords and ads to belong to a certain theme. According to Google AdWords, it’s also helpful to divide your ad groups into “selling points (like free consultation and gourmet menus), or ways to describe your business (like caterer and on-site food service).”

Landing Page Quality

The goal of a PPC campaign is to direct customers to your landing page. It is the page on your website that they see upon clicking your ad. When clicking through to your landing page, make sure they see exactly what they expected. Otherwise, you can bet on your potential customer making a snap decision to hit the back button, which results in what is called a bounce.
Regardless, you want your landing page to quickly engage a potential customer. Your content should be high quality and correspond to their search or the ad clicked.

Keep in mind that the landing page experience also plays a role in a keyword’s Quality Score. It is based on the number of links on the page, how easy it is to navigate, the content’s value and suitability to the customer, among other factors. When making your ad, you will be asked to choose a destination URL. This will most likely be your landing page, unless you use a redirect feature for tracking purposes. Per Google policy, a landing page and display URL must belong to the same website, sharing the same domain. A display URL is the link featured in your ad.

LinkedIn, Facebook, and Bing Advertising

Before choosing a LinkedIn ad, you have to answer the question as to whether it benefits you and your business. The key is your business’ audience. If your products or services are targeted at working professionals or business owners, then you want to look into LinkedIn ads. The cost runs from two to five dollars, with a clickthrough rate of 0.025%. There are a couple of tips you can use to help your clickthrough rate, or CTR. The first is to run no more than two ads at a time. In this case, less is more because you don’t want to hurt your ads’ chances of getting clicked. Another tip is to change your ad every month. Not only does this assist with the number of times your ad is shown (called impressions), a new ad will also increase your opportunity to get a clickthrough than an older one.

As it turns out, users are clicking on Facebook ads. Generating more than $4 billion in revenue for the social networking site, it may be useful to think about placing an ad. The unique thing about Facebook ads is that they are somewhat personalized. Based on profile information, demographics, and location, Facebook offers options that are exclusive to how they create ads.
Once you’ve created an ad, you’re ready to set a budget. You have a couple of options on the bidding process: each click or thousand impressions which your ad acquires. A useful thing to remember about Facebook ads is that users are not on the website to buy a product. The ad serves the purpose of a user becoming familiar with your brand and products, such as via a display ad. Expecting a purchase is risky; instead, asking someone to sign up or submit their email address is a low key approach to encouraging a potential sale.

In the case of Bing, it is one of the largest paid search vendors. With more than 162 million searchers on Microsoft and Yahoo! sites, Bing has more than 6 billion searches every month and 30 percent of total search engine share. Bing ads work roughly the same way as AdWords, sharing features such as setting your own budget and only paying when your ad is clicked. A unique feature is importing your existing PPC campaigns (i.e. Google AdWords) to Bing ads. It may be something to think about, considering that keyword bidding is actually lower because the competition is lower. If you’re focusing on business-to-business campaigns, Bing achieves a higher rate of traffic and ROI than its main competitor. Not to be counted out, Bing ads can be just as useful when contributing to your PPC campaign.

Next Steps

We’ve tried to be as thorough as we can here, but we can only scratch the surface. However, with this overview, and the first three blog posts in the SEM series, you’re probably well on your way to planning your SEM campaign. You’d like to execute now.
However, we have more to share with you! Next week we cover the mechanics of SEO and the mechanics of Google Places. Stay tuned!

What’s the best place to advertise online? The answer today is more complicated than it’s ever been. Google AdWords is what comes to mind when somebody thinks of a classic Pay-Per-Click campaign (and we’re talking about AdWords in our next blog post).

But the choices are endless, and they’re getting more numerous.

The question is: what’s the perfect place for your customers and your particular product or service?

Where do your customers spend their time?

If you watched our webinar on building buyer personas, you should have a detailed profile of who your target market is. What their likes are, their dislikes, their dreams, problems, beliefs and hobbies.

You’ll also know where they spend most of their time online (if they even spend time online). In this video, Roar Local says that if your target market is a 60-year old grandmother whose only online activity is emailing her friends using an AOL email address but hates computers, then you shouldn’t advertise online. Catalog marketing would be the best approach for her.

Where does your ideal customer spend his or her time online?

• Do they have a favorite blog?
• Do they visit major news sites?
• Do they spend a lot of time on Facebook?
• Do they like watching cat videos on YouTube?
• Are they constantly searching for new sites on StumbleUpon?
• Is your customer a traveling sales person who uses her phone to search for cool places to eat?

Your persona profile will tell you where your ideal customer spends his time, which is also the key for the best way to reach them.

The Ever Growing List of Online Advertising Options

As I mentioned above, the list of where to advertise online is very long, and growing longer. Ad networks, social media, individual blogs and independent websites are now being joined by the mobile experience.

Here’s a sample list of the most common places to advertise, but this is by no means a comprehensive list.

Search Engines

Google AdWords is by far the best known and largest online property to advertise, with Yahoo and Microsoft’s Bing in second and third places, respectively, in the U.S.

However, if your market is global, you should check out this article from CNET, which says that China’s Baidu network is ranked 2^nd in the world, and fourth was Russian’s Yandex network.

Ad Networks

Closely related to search engines are ad networks. Google, Yahoo, Bing and many other companies manage advertising on third party sites. If you’ve ever visited several websites in a row, and you saw the exact same ad in the header or the sidebar, then you probably encountered sites whose advertising was managed by an ad network.

Two of the most famous are the Google Display Network and the Google Affiliate Network. The Google Display Network is massive, encompassing more than 4 billion daily page views, 700 million monthly users, and reaching more than 80% of the online audience. It enables you as a business owner to advertise on potentially thousands or millions of independent websites that your potential customers frequent on a daily basis.

We’ll cover another way to advertise on independent websites, but the Google Display Network is one of the most powerful, if not overlooked, ways to advertise online.

Website Marketing Reviews has a fairly comprehensive overview of ad networks in general.

Social Media Options

YouTube

YouTube is actually the third largest search engine in the U.S., and the fourth in the world, according to Karmasnack. Using videos is a great way to separate yourself from your competition, so this is an advertising property I would pay special attention to.

Facebook

Facebook is the fourth largest search engine in the U.S., according to the Karmasnack article, and at 1.06 billion active users as of January 30 2013, it’s the world’s largest social network.

Facebook is amazing not just because of its sheer size, but also because of the level of micro-targeting you have access to. You can target your advertising with very detailed demographic and geographic options, allowing you to spend far less than you would normally spend on a Google ad, yet achieve much more targeted results.

LinkedIn

If your buyer is more of a business buyer, then LinkedIn advertising is probably a better fit. As with Facebook, you can target specific demographic characteristics, with the addition of companies and industries. Again, a very cost-effective way to micro-target your audience.

Other Social Networks

Twitter, Pinterest and many other social networks allow advertising. A very fruitful but little known source for social advertising is StumbleUpon Paid Discovery.

B2B Networks

If you sell a niche product or service to a B2B audience, you might want to consider advertising on one of many niche websites or ad networks, such as IT BusinessEdge and UBM Tech.

For a younger, hipper IT crowd, venture capitalists and geeky consumers, sites such as Mashable, TechCrunch GigaOm, VentureBeat, ReadWriteWeb, ClickDex and Sociable Blogs present interesting alternative advertising networks.

Blogs

The beautiful thing about the web is that you can approach independent owners of successful blogs that target your ideal customer. Many bloggers don’t take advertising, but many do. Independent bloggers also provide an added benefit: many of them are willing to enter into an affiliate relationship with you. Essentially, you don’t pay for the ads until somebody actually buys something, a great option if your advertising budget is low or non-existent.

Mobile Advertising

Mobile advertising is the brave new frontier of online advertising. I would venture to say that anybody who advertises online should put this at the front of their list (always taking into account who your target market is).

Mobile is the fastest growing way to reach the internet. It already surpasses the desktop in most third world countries. If you haven’t made mobile a centerpiece of your online marketing, you’re behind the eight ball.

Your Next Steps

Where to advertise is a complex subject which requires lots of due diligence on your part. To summarize, you need to:

• Create a complete profile of your target market. This is known as a “persona.” Our recent webinar guest Xavier Colomés described the importance of “Personas.”
• Find out where your target market spends most of their time online. Are they Facebook junkies or do they prefer to read about the latest new iPhone apps on Mashable?
• Explore all the different possibilities for advertising online, including the major search engines, ad networks, social media properties, B2B networks, independent blogs and websites, and affiliate networks.

In our next installment we’re covering the mechanics of one particular type of advertising: Google Adwords.

See you then!