In general, it is good practice to make your website fast and usable. But did you know that it also affects your SEM efforts? Your quality scores for your ads and keywords in both AdCenter and AdWords take elements of your landing page’s performance into account.
“Well,” you ask, “what can I, a lowly website owner and potential or current advertiser, do about this dilemma?” or “How do I know if page speed and user experience are issues on my site?”
Answers to these questions vary in range from highly technical solutions to very simple changes that can have an impact on your advertising and overall user happiness in general. You want happy users, don’t you? Their happiness brings you word of mouth referrals to compliment your paid advertising, stretching the reach and value of your advertising budget.
“How do I know if page speed and user experience are issues on my site?”
Page Speed
The general answer here will most likely be: They are. Now, that is a pretty big statement from anyone, let alone a single engineer. And since I fancy myself a scientist, I’ll pass you off to a way to determine the imperfectness of any website known to man. Google Page Speed(https://developers.google.com/pagespeed/). Head there and type the address of your site in the box and click analyze. You should see something. Even Google, Facebook, CNN, and AOL have room for improvement. If your score is higher than 80 and you have no high priority, you’re generally OK. If you only have low priority items, you’re great, I’m a liar and you can stop reading about page speed (You should still check out my thoughts on user experience or the editors may have me flogged for writing an irrelevant blog post).
For more info, read Google’s help page on load time and quality:
http://support.google.com/adwords/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=87144
User Experience
Page speed is part of a user’s experience. No one wants to wait for a graphics heavy pages to load. Users also don’t need to be bombarded with everything under the sun that you have to offer. Remember that the user searched for a specific thing that matched one of your keywords, so show them that. Never clutter your landing pages with unrelated material and please, PLEASE, don’t put ads on your landing pages. AdCenter recommends not placing “a lot of advertising on your landing pages” but, in my humble opinion, don’t put any. If you are buying the keyword “teddy bears,” don’t land your potential users on a page selling toy trucks and don’t land your users on the home page unless all you do is sell teddy bears. Also, try to avoid redirects on your landing pages. Instead, land users directly on the relevant page itself. And as always, make your landing page relevant to your ads and keywords. If your landing page is informational, don’t try to pepper in keywords. Just write it normally and if your chosen keywords aren’t relevant, maybe you have the wrong keywords.
You can read more about user experience on landing pages at
http://advertising.microsoft.com/small-business/product-help/adcenter/topic?query=moonshot_conc_aboutlandingpageuserexp.htm
and
http://support.google.com/adwords/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=46675
“Well,” you ask, “what can I, a lowly website owner and potential or current advertiser, do about this dilemma?”
Simple page speed improvements
- Be specific: Remove clutter from landing pages. This focuses the user on what you are selling (what you are paying advertising dollars for) and don’t distract users with other offers on the landing page
- Land directly on the desired page: Don’t redirect through a special page, land users on the correct page directly
- Optimize images: If you are using images, make sure they are good for the web. Create thumbnails for large images and specify the sizes in the HTML, if possible. Don’t just specify the size in the <img> tag and leave the image as-is. A 5 megabyte, 15 megapixel jpeg included like so <img src=”my5megapixel.jpg” width=”200″ height=”150″> still requires the browser to download the entire 5 megabyte image and it resizes only after it is downloaded.
Simple user experience improvements:
- Land directly on the desired page: Don’t redirect through a special page, land users on the correct page directly
- Keep your landing pages free of irrelevant information
- Keep ads off of your landing pages. If you want users to see other offerings on your site, create other ads for those offerings. If you are using services like AdSense, don’t put them on your landing pages (this should be very obvious since it could potentially give other sites your advertising budget anyway).
Obviously, this is no small subject and this article just scratches the surface. You can read into the suggestions from Google’s Page Speed tool to find more information about specfic site speed ups. Check out the other links in this post to continue learning about why page speed and user experience are important parts of online advertising.
We all know by now what daily deals site are and we can mention a few from the top of our heads: Groupon, Living Social, and our friends from Tampa CrowdSavings.com . Last year’s Super Bowl brought us the first ads for daily sites like Groupon and Living Social. Daily deal sites have become somewhat of a darling for the media for both good and bad reasons. As companies, they have been able to grow at phenomenal rates that have made their investors very, very happy. They have been able to tap a new way to move coupons online in an effective and cheap manner. On the bad side, a lot has been said about the experience of the small businesses with making the deals profitable. However, it is not the purpose of this blog to discuss if this type of marketing is effective or not for small businesses but more so to understand the difference in intent from campaigns in the search engines and daily deals.
When users search on Google or Bing for something, they are in some level of an information-gathering mind frame. They can be at the earlier stages of the funnel, trying to find a solution or information about a problem or need they have. They can be deeper down the funnel, for example now searching for specific solutions or more defined search queries that spawn after the initial research. In essence they are looking for something. Their intent is defined. On the other hand, daily deals marketing does not rely so much on intent as on convenience and discounts. When I receive my daily deals, I have no specific intent to fulfill a specific need. I am more on a journey of discovery. I want to find good deals or discover businesses that I would otherwise not think about.
As a small business owner you need to keep this in mind when deciding about your marketing. In paid search campaigns you want to be clear about your products and services. You need to make sure your keywords, ads, and landing page are relevant. You are buying clicks from people that are searching for something specific. Give them what they want.
In daily deal campaigns, make sure you do something more than just give a good price. You want to attract clients that are not specifically looking for you. Your only differentiators should not be a good deal, but a good price. You need to come up with an exciting proposition. Make sure your deal is unique and exciting…Not just a pizza for half price.
If you want clients getting to visit your site based on a specific need, do pay per click campaigns on Google AdWords or Microsoft AdCenter. If you want clients to find you through exploration, do a daily deal campaign. My recommendation is DO BOTH. Not one or the other. They both complement each other and will end up providing cross pollination for your small business marketing.
Dear Small Business Owner,
Welcome to SiteWit SMB. We just released this new version of SiteWit which uses the same optimization engine as our SiteWit Agency product but is geared for Small Businesses just like yours.
Please let us know if we can be of any help or if you have any questions or comments on how to market your small business online.
Thanks.
Ricardo Lasa
CEO
SiteWit
