First PPC campaign - landing page dilemma

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palmvalley

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Jul 16, 2012
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OK basic question here.

I'm ready to get starting losing money so I can learn PPC! I've done some research on a niche and I found a product on clickbank that I want to promote (I know, I know, but I applied to another affiliate network and wasn't accepted so I'm just going to start with clickbank).

What I am struggling with is what landing page to point my ad to. If I make my own landing page to promote the product, then people will have to click through to the product's landing page before they eventually buy, and it seems like I will lose a lot of people that way.

I could make the ad link to my domain which is forwarded directly to the product's own landing page, but I'm afraid Google will ban me for that. Or is that the best way to do it?

Thanks!
 


You cannot promote directly to the product with Adwords for a few reasons.
1. Google won't approve it.
2. If they do you'll have a really shitty quality score so you'll be paying way too much for clicks.
3. Your conversion rate will suck anyway without preselling the product.

Unless you are a veteran, Google is always too expensive as a source of traffic, so find another source or go super niche with very low search volume. They also hate affiliate sites, so you might be get disapproved either way.
You should link them to your landing page, presell them on the product with a review or an interesting bit of content and then have them click over to the product page. It's best practice.
 
Thank you! I've now set up my site as a review site. Looked at the cost per click of some keywords on Adwords and I was shocked, figured there was no way to do anything but lose lots o' money at that rate.

I set up an MSN Adcenter account and will check that out today. Any other recommendations? I am also going to try to optimize the site for organic traffic (I heard that helps your google quality score as well) but of course that will take months.
 
To answer your first question...

A good landing page will almost always make you more money than direct linking. Sometimes sending the person straight to the offer page isn't enough to make the person convert.

So to give you a basic example. Lets say you're promoting a dating offer. If you direct link it to eharmony, the offer page is just a basic signup form.

Lets say you're doing a landing page. One thing you can do is give a testimonial where you have a story about how you met the love of your life through eharmony. Another could be a landing page where you post a bunch of pics of hot girls as eharmony users, and post bullet points about the benefits of joining.

In the end, the landing page should cause a higher conversion rate and overall it'll make more money than direct linking.

My advice is to just skip adwords. Focus on facebook or plenty of fish.
 
Your CTR will definitely be higher if using a landing page. Direct linking to the advertiser's landing page will lose you conversions.
 
Thanks everyone, very helpful. One additional question, does my landing page need to be part of a larger multi-page SEO optimized site? If I set up just a single landing page on a brand new domain, will that work? Or maybe it doesn't matter if I'm not using Adwords?

I am also planning to build some SEO sites but that will take me a few months as I'm doing it myself for the first time rather than outsourcing. I'd like to start experimenting with CPC advertising and a few clickbank offers simultaneously, mostly as a learning experience.
 
I'm also interested in this. What if it's your product, and you are either promoting it thru adwords, or split testing the copy. Should you still have a presell landing page?

Thanks,
Sherpa
 
Its been years since you could promote affiliate stuff with adwords. From memory, yahoo/bing will let you do it though.
 
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