This short video form the Google Business Youtube channel shows how to use remarketing, a great AdWords feature that allows you to show ads to your site visitors as they browse other pages across the Google Display Network.

Further resources:
Google Ad Innovations - Remarketing
What is Remarketing and why should I use it?

Here are 10 quick tips to help you produce a successful landing page. They're hopefully a good checklist to consider when building a page, but as always you should test each element to make sure they work to produce the right outcomes for your pages.

1. Don't try to do too much on the page - don't overfill your page. Instead, make your page clear, succinct and effective for achieving its main purpose.
   
   
2. Make use of bullet points. Typically, you have 3 seconds to get across what your page/offer is about before a visitor decides to stay on the page or navigate away. Making bullet points the focus of the page should help to convey your main message quickly and effectively.
   
   
3. Keep everything above fold (especially the form) if possible.
   
   
4. Mention the offer in the headline.
   
   
5. Keep navigation to a minimum - this reduces the temptation for the visitor to navigate away from page and increases the likelihood of them completing the call to action.


6. Make text on buttons action orientated e.g. "Download now", "Get your white paper".
   
   
7. Set expectations & show the value of the content in your copy/headline e.g. "Free 10 page white paper on... " rather than 'Free white paper"
   
   
8. Add social sharing links to let people share the landing page / content with their peers - can help to increase the exposure to your brand/content.
   
   
9. A 3 column layout generally works well - left hand column has image of content - centre column (wider) has main offer / bullet points - right hand column has form.
   
   
10. Add a check box on a content download form that lets people quickly & easily sign up to your newsletter at the same time.
    

Useful links:
Which Test Won
Hubspot
Marketing Experiments

Using search marketing to generate business leads can seem like a daunting task.  If you're not careful you can end up drowning in keywords!  But if you do it well you can produce high quality leads for your business.  

I'm a Senior Marketing Manager for the RBI lead generation business Approved Index, which has generated over 300,000 business leads since 2004 using search marketing.

If you're considering using paid search and SEO channels to generate leads for your business then these tips are designed to help you clarify your strategy.

1.    Segment & Profile Your Target Audience

Search Marketing may offer fairly new routes to market, but the fundamentals of old school marketing still need to be applied.  By segmenting and profiling your audience at the start you'll ensure you don't waste time and money targeting erroneous keywords later on.  Take a look at Emma Peskett's post on 15 initial considerations for lead nurturing programs for some ideas.

2.    What Are The Information Needs Of Your Target Audience?

As part of the profiling exercise, take time to work out the information needs of your customers and highlight those that you could address in a way that is relevant to your business model.  For example, Approved Index targets business buyers so provides visitors with buyers guides and pricing guides to help in the decision making process.

3.    What Keyword Terms Do They Use To Search For Information?

Build a seed list of terms based on the profiling and information needs exercise.  You may be able to flesh this out further by looking at your competitors' websites, your customer websites or websites that your audience regularly use.  

Use this seed list as a starting point for your keyword research - tools such as the Google Keyword Tool, the Google wonder wheel or Word Tracker can be useful for this.

4.    Keep Your Landing Page Relevant

Make sure that every page that you send your visitors to, via paid search or organic search, is relevant to the search query they have made.  Each page is a unique shop front that needs to draw visitors in and get them buying.

• Ensure the keyword phrase appears in the page title or main heading/sub-headings.
• Keep images relevant to the search and test to find the best fit.  Images can have a massive impact on the conversion rate so make sure you use one that works best for your business.
• Try to include the keyword phrase in the page URL e.g. the URL of a page on Approved Index about website designers looks like this.. http://www.approvedindex.co.uk/webdesigners/
  

 
5.    Focus On Your Conversion Rate

You want the conversion rate to be as high as possible whilst still bringing in good quality leads.  Test different designs to see what appeals most to your customers - and be mindful to focus the design on getting a customer to convert.  Try not to distract them with unnecessary information, confusing calls to action or links that take them out of the conversion path. You'll find some good advice at Bryan & Jeffrey Eisenberg Associates

6.    Build Trust With Your Landing Pages

Find ways to prove your credibility through the design of your landing page.   If you're affiliated with a well known brand or you've won awards/accreditations then include the logo on the landing page above the fold and link to a convincing About Us page.

7.    Supply Information That Will Aid Conversion

As part of your customer profiling exercise you should find out what information will potentially aid a conversion on your website.  For Approved Index this is buyers and pricing guides - but for your business it may be a map, an image of the product, or an interview with an industry leader.  Come up with a few ideas and test each to see what is the most successful.

8.    Track & Regularly Analyse Crucial Data

If you're spending budget on paid search then you need to know exactly what return you're getting.  The ideal is to be able to track revenue & profit per keyword as this will enable you to see what high cost per click/cost per conversion keywords are worth spending on, versus those that burn through your budget.  If you can't get keyword level data, then working out your target cost per conversion should still allow you to manage your spending and achieve a decent ROI.

9.    Use PPC (paid search) Data To Inform Your SEO Strategy

If you're using paid search and SEO channels to generate the same type of customer for your business then the two activities should not work in isolation. 

PPC activity can have a positive effect on organic rankings.  By mining paid search data you can find high value keywords that you'll want to optimise content for via organic search, which could help reduce your PPC costs in the long run.  Likewise, organic keywords that generate value for the business can be added to paid search campaigns to really maximise conversions for high demand areas.

10.    Don't Stop Testing

Search marketing is a dynamic world where the rules are constantly changing and competition is fierce so you can't stand still.  Continuous testing is the only way you can keep pace - so test your ad text, test your meta descriptions, test your landing page designs, test your data capture forms and always test your assumptions.

Google released its advertising platform back in 2000. Over 10 years on it has evolved and matured into a sophisticated search marketing channel. It is a common misconception that PPC (pay per click) spend affects your organic rankings; that in some way a paid advertiser is likely to see a boost in their organic rankings. Although this is not the case, what you can learn from your PPC campaigns can give you valuable insight on how to optimise and promote your site in a way that can improve its organic performance.

When Google ranks its PPC ads it considers several factors including:

• Quality Score - this includes keyword relevancy and ad click through rates.
• First Page Bid - Is what Google estimates you would have to pay to be visible on the first page of search results. This is determined by your keyword quality score.
• CPC - how much money you would be willing to pay per click which is determined by the user who sets up the campaign by considering the first page bid.
  

Google considers over 200 signals when ranking pages within the organic search results. These signals constantly evolve and change on a daily basis but major signals include keyword relevancy and its placement within your content.

Some examples of where PPC and SEO activity can work well together:

• Keyword Research - transfers very well between PPC and SEO.
• Ad copy optimisation - where copy is successful in PPC campaigns you can transfer that knowledge to optimise pages for organic search.
• Landing page strategy - PPC people think about landing pages almost exclusively in terms of conversion. SEO people think about landing pages almost exclusively in terms of search engine ranking. By combining the two approaches, you could end up with the perfect landing page - one that ranks highly and converts.
• Quality score - This PPC metric can act as an indicator of how relevant your webpage is to a certain keyword or phrase.
  
• Mitigation of risk - if a page drops down the organic search results, PPC can bridge the gap while the organic performance is being addressed.
• Traffic forecasting - PPC search ads are a reliable way of forecasting how optimising against a particular keyword might perform in terms of traffic and conversions. So wherever an organic search forecast is needed, PPC can act as a reliable predictor.

The last post on PPC, To Pay Or Not To Pay pointed out that sometimes paid search may not be the right marketing activity for your business. If however you can see an opportunity for your business to attract additional visitors via paid search, then these tips should help you get started.

Paid search in a nut shell

Before I dig in to the detail, I'll briefly re-cap how paid search works...Paid search refers to the listings at the top and right hand side of search engines results pages (SERPs). Each time one of these ads is clicked, the advertiser will pay for that click, which is why paid search is often referred to as Pay per Click (PPC) or Cost Per Click (CPC).

Each time a user makes a search an auction takes place for that keyword phrase with advertisers bidding for the best position on a SERP. The bid is not the only factor that determines position. Quality score is also used - this is a metric out of 10 that search engines use to reward advertisers who have the most relevant ads and landing pages. A higher quality score reduces the cost of clicks. This Google video eloquently explains how Google ad auctions work.

5 tips for setting up paid search campaigns

• Make a list of the products or services that your website offers to form a seed list.

• Use a keyword research tool to research this list and find out what actual terms people are using to search for these products and/or services such as the Google Keyword Tool, the Google wonder wheel or Wordtracker.

• Set up a campaign for each distinct product or service, and then group similarly themed words into individual ad groups. The more granular you can make these ad groups the better. You want to aim to have about 20 keywords per ad group.

• Set up ad texts specific to each ad group - 2 or 3 ad texts per ad group is a best practice. Try to make the ad texts as relevant to the keywords in that ad group as possible.

• Set up conversion tracking so you can see if the terms bring in relevant visitors.

5 things to avoid when setting up paid search campaigns

• The Google Content Network: this can be very effective for generating targeted visits as part of a long-term strategy, but it's worth avoiding if you are new to Adwords as it is easy to burn through money very quickly without getting a decent return on investment.

• Bidding on high volume generic terms without implementing negative keywords: these terms can be very expensive and do not always generate the best converting visitors. If you need to bid on generic terms, make sure you include negative keywords to weed out irrelevant traffic.

• Sending traffic to a homepage: you need to make it easy for visitors to complete an action, so send them to pages tailored to specific campaigns rather than making them dig around for the relevant content.

• False Offers: you may be tempted to promote an unrealistic offer in your ad text to push up your click through rates, but if users do not find this offer on your website you'll turn off potential customers and the paid search providers will also penalise you. Keep keywords relevant to ad text and ad text relevant to the landing pages.

• Focusing only on advert click through rates (CTRs): it is in the interests of the paid search providers to encourage you to promote your best performing ads, but you need to make sure that these ads attract relevant visitors that then go on to convert by making a purchase or signing up to the site etc. Focus on achieving a target cost per conversion - and do this by increasing your CTRs and improving your conversion rates These are just a few tips to get you started.

For more hints and advice take a look at other posts on this blog or try out the blogs listed below:

• PPC Hero
• Adwords Blog
• SEM Geek

If you're currently bidding on your brand name in a Pay Per Click (PPC) campaign and sending the visitors that click on your ad to your home page you're potentially missing out on a good source of leads and sales.

At first thought it seems sensible to send visitors searching under your brand name to your home page - from the keyword they entered you can assume they know something about your company, but you don't specifically know what they're searching for (apart from your brand). So it's common practice to send them to your homepage and let them navigate to what they want from there.

Chances are some people will find what they want but others will click away without finding the information they need - it depends on how well optimized your home page is. And some of those that click away could have been potential leads, but now they've just cost you money without you finding out anything about them.

So, if the aim of your website is to generate leads and sales, why not test this tactic...

Instead of sending brand name searches to your home page, create an optimized landing page around some free content that's going to be engaging to your target audience. And then direct the brand name PPC searches to this page. Remember, normal PPC campaign and ad set up rules apply - your landing page and your content still need to be relevant to the keyword - in this case your brand name.

You can put a sign-up form in front of the content so you can start to collect respondents' details. Depending on your business model you can then start to nurture the leads or send them to sales. At the very least you've now got something (information on the responder) from the cost of that click.

This is something we've tested at RBI after getting the idea from Eloqua after searching under their brand name in connection with searches for lead nurturing.

Here's a screen grab of the search results page for the key word 'Eloqua' - in their PPC ad they're offering two different pieces of content (perhaps targeting different personas).

You'll also notice that their organic listing appears underneath the ad giving searchers the more standard links to relevant pages.

And here's the landing page for the eBook - highly optimized for conversion.

Here at RBI we're involved in providing information and marketing solutions to decision makers and professionals. We've created content in the form of white papers, market reports and case studies specifically targeted at our audiences in the industry sectors we serve. We've set up landing pages and changed our 'brand name' ad campaigns so that people are now directed to the content on these pages.

As far as results go, we've generally seen average CTR for the ad-groups increase by over 30%. We've collected details of thousands of prospects that we potentially wouldn't have got otherwise. We know that a number of sales initially entered our funnel via this route and overall the campaigns give us a positive ROI.