Hi, I'm a PPC executive and have been doing it for a medium size company for about 8 months now. I'm GAP qualified in all but name and will do the exam in my own name soon. Anyway, I know that a lot of people drive traffic to sites via PPC and earn commision. They ususally use their own landing pages. I'm wondering if it's possible to drive traffic to such sites own sign up pages direct from the search engine results page, without having to create my own landing page. This would have the dissadvantage of not being trackable at my end but would have the flexibility of not having to build a landing page which would conform to the strict quality score policies of Google. Is this possibe? Why do people create their own landing page. Any feedback would be much appreciated. Joe
I think that you can drive visitors directly to "sell site", but if I'm not wrong, your CPC would go sky high. Landing pages are usually make to inform visitors more about that products and to prepare them to buy. Landing pages are not that hard to make.
it is better you use your own landing page. with landing page you can track with your own tracking method, capture their email for continue relationship instead of not heard from them anymore, redirect to other sites of yours etc.
OK thanks very much. I'm going to use wordpress as a tool for creating the landing pages. Do I then just sign up to given sites' affiliate programs?
Joe....It really simple to make a landing page, from a tehnical point of you. You just use Macromedia Dreamweaver, a WYSIWYG editor and make some clicks and add content. Wordpress , I personally don't recommend it to a landing page.
I don't think Adwords allows you to point directly to your affiliate link. I could be wrong though. You might want to try sponsored ads if that's the technique you want to use.
I've used it to point directly to affiliate links... the URL that is visable doesn't show the affiliate tracking. A lot of affiliates don't allow bidding on top keywords but I recomend making a landing page. With a product review or page with some info to make the sell, it can get expensive.
Joe, Keep in mind every KW and every situation is different... There are a variety of factors in favor of a LP. As you mentioned QS is a huge factor with Google. In response to that, QS can be improved thru creating your own LP, rather than direct linking. Improved QS =lower bids. Another reason is tracking, as you noted. Many programs do not allow conversion tracking codes etc on their pages, thus making a LP essential for that. In response to can you direct link …Sure! As long as the term is available and your Affiliate Program allows it, there is no reason why you "can't" DL. -=Chipmunk=-
Thanks for the response Chipmunk. Regarding the QS of the merchant's page. In some cases and I'm hoping a lot, their pages should already be optimized for the product being promoted. Of course this isn't always going to be the case and Google's QS is sometimes as mysterious as a Witch's coven. I'm willing to run some test on the QS of various merchants before I let that issue bury me. Tracking is a huge issue and ideally, I'd use the conversion optimizer once I had enough conversions, which isn't going to be possible without internal Google tracking. Tracking is one of the prime advantages of PPC so I guess that it's somewhat unfortunate if one has to do away with this advantage. I'm still going to test it and try to track manually using Click Bank's conversion data. What's the advantage of going without a landing page? The ability to quickly run lots of campaigns across lots of verticals simultaniously without investing in what's essentially a whole functioning site (Google say they want full sites not just one page landers). Another advantage is that there are less clicks to get to the purchase page...