Time to continue our AdWords exploration. (I bet you thought I forgot about it!) In Part 1 we dissected AdWords text ads, in Part 2 we looked at AdWords keywords, and in Part 3 we examined the infamous AdWords quality score. Today we combine everything we’ve learned so far to come up with AdWords site design guidelines. Which, not unsurprisingly, end up being good guidelines for AdSense publishers as well.
AdWords Site = Content + Optimized Landing Pages
The basic formula to follow when creating a site in order to get the most bang for your AdWords bucks is quite simple, really. Your site needs two things: content and optimized landing pages. Let’s look at each part separately.
Content
AdSense publishers are already familiar with “content is king”, but AdWords advertisers may not realize how important the content on a site is. “Content” in this context, however, refers to information a potential customer finds useful. These include but are not limited to:
- Contact information: Who are you? Where are you located? Do you have a phone number? A mailing address? A contact form? The more details you can provide, the better.
- Privacy policy: What do you do with customer information? How do you collect it? Is it safe?
- Logos and certifications: Are you a member of the BBB? Do you have a “hacker safe” designation? Prominently mention this kind of stuff.
- Sitemap: Help the customer navigate the site.
- Sample newsletters: If the customer is going to sign up for your list, let them see a sample of what they’ll get first.
- Product details: Tell as much as you can about the product(s) you’re selling.
Google in particular loves to see detailed contact information along with clear privacy policies. A “good” advertiser site from their point of view therefore consists of at least three pages:
- The home page (i.e. the default landing page)
- The “about” page (contact information)
- The privacy policy page (disclaimers, etc.)
If you have a one-page selling site, as many affiliates do, you can generally increase your quality score simply by adding contact information (either on the page itself or separately as described above) and a privacy policy.
But don’t stop there. You’ll do even better if you have more content on your site. Articles about topics related to what you’re selling: tips, techniques, things you can do with the products, etc. Make sure these articles are available from the home page and are also listed in your sitemap. Use basic search engine optimization (SEO) principles when you create this content (you may be able to grab or rewrite content from elsewhere) but don’t focus too much on the SEO aspect — you’re including this content not to rank well in the search engines (although that would be a great side benefit) but to keep the potential customer on your site and increase the probability that they will buy something, sign up for your mailing list, etc. The longer they visit, the better.
Optimized Landing Pages
Having good content is the basis for a decent quality score. But you can go one step further by creating optimized landing pages that are geared specifically to the keywords you’re targeting and the text of your ads. By matching the keywords to the ads to the landing pages you get the highest quality score.
It’s not hard to do, but it takes time. The first step is to create narrowly-targeted ad groups. Each ad group should consist of only a few closely-related keywords (ideally one keyword per group, not counting the matching variants or negative keywords). Each ad in the group should include one or more of the keywords in the ad text.
The second step is to create specific landing pages for each ad group. The title of the page should include the primary keyword or phrase in the group. It should also be in the main heading and at various other points on the page. Big bonus points if you can also get the keyword into the URL of the page itself.
If this sounds like work to do, it is, and it’s not very exciting work either. The payoff is in sometimes drastically reduced advertising costs. (There are systems you can buy or code yourself to do some of the grunt work for you, such as generating landing pages that are automatically “tuned” to a given keyword. These can be a real time-saver, but make sure that the landing pages they generate actually make sense!)
At this point some of you are going to worry about all that duplicate content. If you have 20 ad groups, after all, you’ll be creating 20 landing pages but they won’t be very different from each other. Don’t wet your pants! If it worries you, exclude your landing pages from the search engines using your robots.txt file: that’s what it’s for. Just be sure, however, to let the AdWords landing page quality bot see those pages, otherwise all your work will be for naught. See the AdWords help for more details.
What’s Next
At this point I hope everyone reading this series has a good grasp of the basic principles necessary to lower their advertising costs. If something’s not clear, please leave a comment and I’ll be happy to explain it further. Next, we’ll start the actual case study by looking for an affiliate product (or products) to advertise. The eventual goal is to build a site around that product that we can then advertise via AdWords and hopefully get ourselves a positive return on investment (ROI).
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Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated (that just means it lost!) blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense. Subscribe to the blog and get free stuff!
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