Changed Landing Page Design & PPC Costs Have Hiked

[Gavin]

I'm hoping for some advice on this one.

I am competing in a highly competitive niche and was previously paying between 0.80 - 1.50 per click for an average of 2nd - 7th positions .

My conversions were not the best so I decided to revamp the landing pages. The only thing I've really changed is adding some extra images and removing some fluff content.

I had only uploaded the changes yesterday and now I'm looking at 5 Euro bids to sit on the 3rd & 4th results page.

My question is will these bids change when Google establishes what changes have been made to the landing pages?

 

[louie]

bids for certain keywords are based on text no images so by removing them you probably made it worse.
You should have tried to improve the quality by adding some related keywords and phrases.

 

[Gavin]

bids for certain keywords are based on text no images so by removing them you probably made it worse.

Thanks Louie, I was thinking that. The fluff content removed didn't really have much keywords - although it did have its uses for readers.

I need to take a better look at the text content and find the happy medium.

 

[louie]

When you try to make the perfect landing page and perfect ad look into the following things:

1. catchy title (to make me read the content)
2. related and good content (why and what)
3. call to action (why should I click on this?)

 

[Gavin]

In regards to the title. I'm using different landing pages for different keywords so the titles are based on those keywords.

The content is the tricky part for me. I don't want too much clutter and take away the chance of the visitor not buying, a reason why I changed it in the first place.

The call to action I do have but I'm thinking of adding one of those big pointy arrows just to be sure.

Per usual its all done to testing.

Cheers for the advice Louie.

 

[CiaranR]

Did you notice a big change in your quality score? It would tie in with what louie is saying, if you removed some of your keywords from the landing page, your quality score will drop and your min bid and ppc cost will shoot up.

 

[Gavin]

Ya everything dropped off the map, impressions (zero today), CTR (0%) and positioning.

After the previous posts with Louie I've done some tweaking, adding some extra keywords, a better disclaimer (with keywords) and better titles. Now I'm starting to see my position climb up to 10th/11th but my bids are sitting 2.65 - still too high.

I need to monitor this closely and see where I do more tweaks. Funny thing is these new landing pages are way better than the previous - Google seems to see different though.

 

[louie]

check the title of the page making sure it has your keywords included.

Create an h1 tag (if there is none) at the top of the page that will include your most important keywords to build the strength of the page.

 

[Redfly]

What I ahve been doing a lot of lately is starting out on MSN and YSM and using the traffic from there combined with testing and heatmaps to make the perfect landing page. Then and only then, copy the campaign over to Google.

I don't know if this is related, but in the last two days there has been a huge smackdown on a lot of keywords in Google and they all happen to be TMs. I am almost certain that Google has updated something to give a poor QS to all registered TMs, or at least those that have received bidding complaints from their owners.

Is this an affiliate site or a thin content site?
Something that has worked well for me is adding a blog to the site. Even just link to the blog in the footer. Create a post about and with the title of every long tail term you find in your analytics. Google seems to like this a LOT.

 

[Gavin]

check the title of the page making sure it has your keywords included.

Aye this is usually the first step I do when creating a page, even for landing pages. Using H1 headings etc is default with me.

Is this an affiliate site or a thin content site?

Its a thin content site. I was pondering on the idea of adding a blog as I've seen you mention that elsewhere. MSN & YSM seems to be an idea, I've left them in the dark for too long.

There has been a heck amount of improvement from earlier today. Have the bids averaging in around $1 for 1st page positions so it might be just a matter of improving each landing page a bit more.