Landing page + Content network

[donaldke]

Hello,

I am new to this forum as I don't use adwords often and I think there is just too much fraud out there. However, I decided now to give it another try and I have 2 questions:

I) Conversion rates for content network are poor due to many factors and I should just turn it off, correct?

II) Our products are very visual and we have a testimonial page with many images of our "happy customers" alongside the products. Do you think it is a good idea to have people land on that page instead of just the product page or home page of our company?

Thanks.

[netmeg]

I) Conversion rates for content network are poor due to many factors and I should just turn it off, correct?

Not necessarily. Some content sites convert very well for my clients. The important thing is to create a SEPARATE campaign for content. Content performs very differently, and your content strategy should be different from your search strategy anyway. Once the placement reports are up and running, it'll be a lot easier to make decisions regarding content. But you don't have to rule it out entirely - just create one campaign for search, and one for content.

II) Our products are very visual and we have a testimonial page with many images of our "happy customers" alongside the products. Do you think it is a good idea to have people land on that page instead of just the product page or home page of our company?

If you want to keep your costs down and your quality score up, you probably don't want to send it to your home page. I would create a landing page that is a combination of your product page AND some testimonials - but you can fairly easily test different landing pages to see what works best for you.

[donaldke]

OK so here is another question / problem - our products are in te $200 - $800 range. We sell only a few each week. One day we will make 1 sale, the other 3 sales, then a week without a single sale. From what I can tell there are so many factors that go into when and if there are sales - it can be the weather, the day of the month, holidays, general mood of people, the Sopranos going off the air - god knows what....

When you deal with such low numbers of sales, it is impossible to get a real pictures from the conversion rate statistics. We can do some change in the landing page and then not see a sale for a week. But we will never know if it is because it is the end of the month and people do not have cash in their account or because of the changes we did to the landing page....

Any insights into this?

[Roadrunner]

You might want to define an intermediate measure of success, e.g. visitors of your site go to a certain page that is one or more steps away from the landing page, or leaving their contact information/signing up for a newsletter. That way you can start tracking those "conversions" and optimize for them.

[seostew]

Look at trends on a month-to-month basis, not on a day by day or week by week basis. As long as a high positive ROI being achieved and constantly being sough after, why try to dissect it further?

constantly add new test keyword phrase, and drop those not converting, not receiving impressions, and not getting clicks.