Spinfield: Web marketing trends today, tomorrow, and beyond…

I’ve always practiced landing page optimization for search engine marketing campaigns, but it has never been more apparent to me how import a role it can actually play in a truly optimized pay-per-click campaign.

One of my clients, TCP, Inc., recently engaged us to produce an event for Earth Day on April 22, 2008. The project involved producing a quality video segment centered around compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFLs) in order to answer consumers questions about the controversy centered around the product. The video needed to reside on it’s own site centered around an “earthy” design.

IdeaStar was also tasked with marketing the event online. It was decided that for this first event the marketing would be mostly grass roots. Noel Lavezzi from TCP invited several members of the media to a special sneak preview of the Earth Day event so that they could write their stories and release them on Earth Day. Tina Ricciardi from TCP compiled a list of hundreds of bloggers to also preview the event in order to blog about the program.

I did some keyword research centered around Earth Day and CFLs for a search engine marketing campaign to drive consumers to register to watch the event live on Earth Day. I came up with a list of 100-plus keywords and a budget of over $500/day to run the campaign starting a week before the event was to air live.

The site that housed the Earth Day event was only one page so creating a landing page to then lead consumers to a one page site seemed to me to be a wasted effort so I pointed the Google AdWords campaign directly to the main Earth Day registration page. There was no user-friendly way I could get good keyword density for over 100+ keywords.

What I found out next did not surprise me. Google came back and told me that most of my keywords quality scores were poor and that I would need to increase my minimum cost-per-click to at least $5.00 per keywords before my ads would show.

This was a problem that I needed to solve quickly as Earth Day was only a few days away and we needed to get as much traffic to the site as possible.

Being a programmer for 8 years taught me a lot about sending dynamic variables to and through pages, so I came up with an idea.  I decided to use Google’s keyword insertion procedure to stick the keyword at the end of my URL . I then programmed my Web page to look for this URL variable. If the page recognizes the variable, I have it inserted into the title tag, inserted into my meta keywords tags and a header tag on the page.

Now, when Google checks the quality and relevance of my landing page, it finds the exact keyword it is checking for. The results were better than I expected. More than 95% of all my keyword quality scores changed from “Poor” to “Great”. The minimum bid ranges changed from $5.00 to between $0.01-$0.10.

This one change helped the campaign to be highly successful. We received a lot of traffic and registrations to the site, and I learned a new pay-per-click landing page optimization technique that I can take with me and use on other campaigns.

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