Your home page isn’t a good landing page for a pay-per-click advertising campaign
Lake Leelanau, MI (PRWEB) November 23, 2005 -–
“Home for the Holidays” may be a wonderful sentiment, but it’s a poor marketing strategy to lead holiday shoppers to a home page, notes Oneupweb, a trusted leader in search engine optimization and marketing. Oneupweb makes this and other tips available in a whitepaper, Are Your Pay-per-click Campaigns Ready for the Holidays and a supporting webinar recording, Ringing In Holiday Sales Through Savvy Paid Search Campaigns. Both are available at Oneupweb.com.
“Your home page isn’t a good landing page for a pay-per-click advertising campaign,” explains Oneupweb CEO Lisa Wehr. “A customer’s click should land directly on a page with a holiday theme that’s relevant to the campaign, and make it easy to search for and purchase a gift.”
During the live webinar co-hosted by Chris Sherman of SearchEngineWatch.com, Oneupweb discovered that nearly one-third of participants admitted they didn’t know how to measure their campaigns’ success. “That’s an appalling number,” Wehr says. “The first question a marketer should ask when designing a holiday campaign is: ‘Do I have my analytics in place?’ Otherwise, you can’t tell what’s working and what’s not.”
The webinar audience also reported using a wide budget range for campaigns running this season. Nearly half the participants had relatively small budgets (less than $10,000), while 13 percent had budgeted more than $80,000 for pay-per-click advertising to drive their online marketing.
“Whatever the budget, marketers are trying to maximize campaign efficiency. And with pay-per-click campaigns they can make changes mid-season, saving thousands,” says Wehr. “The lessons learned today in this paper and webinar can help marketers save money, tomorrow. It’s just that fast.”
Oneupweb has developed ten questions marketers should ask when designing a paid campaign for the holiday rush. In addition to measurement tools, discussion points include:
- Holiday keywords – shoppers use terms like Christmas, Chanukah and Kwanzaa
- Comparing click-through rates – making sure that short-term campaigns generate at least as much response as ongoing efforts
- Cost per acquisition – learning which words and phrases generate the most clicks and highest sales
- Linking ads to specific landing pages – leading the customer directly to a purchase, instead of an endless menu of choices
- Testing – how to test ad creative to see which messages work best
- Budgeting – build increased response rates into your pay-per-click budget
- Shopping engines – taking advantage of this growing force in online marketing
- Adjusting the campaign for product and shipping availability – as the holiday nears, inventory and shipping become more important
Wehr stresses that marketers should use these strategies year-round. “Holidays aren’t just in December,” she says. “Valentine’s Day, Mardi Gras, Passover, Halloween and other events are all opportunities to attract customers. It’s never too early to plan for the next big sales season.”
About Oneupweb
Oneupweb has been the trusted leader in search engine optimization (SEO) and marketing (SEM) since 1996. The only two-time winner of the prestigious ClickZ Best Search Engine Marketing Vendor Award, Oneupweb specializes in tailoring custom strategies that include natural search engine optimization, paid search marketing, search engine user behavior, PR optimization and marketing analytics designed to deliver superior return on investment. Oneupweb publishes the industry-leading search engine marketing newsletter OneUpNews and blog StraightUpSearch, providing readers with strategic SEO / SEM insight. Oneupweb’s clients include Unisys, Maritz, TransUnion, LasikPlus, Schwan’s, Silkflowers.com and BuyCostumes.com, among many others. Named to BtoB Magazine’s Who’s Who List in 2004 & 2005 and recognized as a Leader & Innovator by Lawrence Technological University, Oneupweb is a privately held company located in Michigan. For more information on Oneupweb, please contact 231.256.9811 or visit Oneupweb.com.
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