I have set aside Fridays to work on various tasks related to DriveTraffic.ca. Today’s task was to explore the PPC interfaces of search engines other than Google AdWords in order to be able to offer this service to clients.

Today I set up an ad for WebTrends Training on Ask.com. The setup was pretty quick and easy considering I did not read one iota of help :-)

One task I have tried to do so far without success is to go back and edit my keywords to be in a #1 position as my ad does not appear to be showing on Ask.com when I query my keyword phrases - I believe the reason is that other advertisers are paying more money than I am, which puts them higher. I guess I could test it by changing my cpc.

One thing I have noticed as well is that it is time consuming to go back in and edit and ad - perhaps a rookie would find this with AdWords as well and I am just incredibly comfortable with the AdWords interface…even if they do change it monthly sometimes!

Last comment for today on Ask.com is that so far I have not seen any geo-targeting options such as only showing my ads in USA or specific states.

Next post should be a review of the MSN Ad Center experience.

A client recently asked me which would be better on their website: a form all on one page or a multi page form for visitors to complete.

They were asking from an SEO standpoint - and from an SEO perspective it does not really matter since forms are not spiderable to search engines.

From a visitor completion (conversion) standpoint, the question is major…I just didn’t know the answer to the question as it varies by industry and by site. The only proper way to answer this question is with A/B testing.

Google has just released free software to do this called Google Website Optimizer. Like all of Google’s releases, it is only available to certain advertisers who fill out a form and request the software.

From their site:

Use Website Optimizer to test different website content. Graphical reports show which content engages your audience and results in the highest conversions. Run that content to improve your users’ experience and convert visitors to customers. Complete the steps below and sign-up to participate in our beta test. We can only invite a small number of advertisers at this time, but hope to open the tool to all Advertisers over the coming months.

I completed my request to beta test and will announce here if we are accepted ;-)

P.S. I just came across a blog posting by a former SEM student who is offering a Webinar entitled “Increasing Your Landing Page Conversion with Google Website Optimizer”. The Webinar is free (aside from a long distance phone call), is 40 minutes long and takes place November 10. Signup on the ROI Revolution website.

After reading a post by Randfish on the SEOmoz Blog about Google showing an icon beside the ads of merchants who offer Google Checkout to their website visitors, I decided to conduct a couple of searches to see if we can see this in Canada.

When Google was beta testing Click to Call and showing a phone beside certain ads, we could not see this when doing a search in Canada.

Apparently we are not seeing the Google Checkout icon either, but in the process of looking for it I discovered that AdWords is showing geographical locations under some ads. The geo-location so far is city or province and is only showing on Canadian ads (I am searching using Google.ca but have not limited my choices to Canada only).

See the screenshot below, for a search on “affordable furniture” without quotes.

We all know that you should create customized landing pages for your various PPC campaigns.

Google (a while back) implemented a quality score but just recently incorporated landing page quality into the algorithm which provides this quality score. Sites with poor landing pages will be forced to pay more per click than another site with a “quality” landing page.

What is a quality landing page? Google AdWords Landing Page and Site Quality Guidelines offers a few pointers such as:

• Provide relevant and substantial content
• Treat a user’s personal information responsibly
• Develop an easily navigable site

Google does go into a bit more detail on each of these pointers, but there are various other conversations going on around the internet that elaborate on landing page quality as well including Analyzing the Google AdWords Landing Page Algorithm at Search Engine Watch.

One of the more interesting items I have taken out this is the privacy policy, which I will discuss in a separate post :-)

In today’s issue of SearchReturn, Detlef mentions a post on SEW entitled New Landing Page Quality Score Announced for Google AdWords Advertisers.

The essence of this announcement is that some advertisers will be faced with higher minimum bids to keep their campaigns running on AdWords, as a result in changes being made to the landing page quality score algorithm.

Out of the various readings, including the Google Blog, what stands out to me is something that has long needed to be addressed: advertisers who buy inexpensive pay per click traffic, only to lead the visitor to a landing page which contains additional links. These links are often just higher-paying ads (often Google AdSense or Yahoo ContentMatch), which generate income for the website owner and a lack of relevant content for the visitor.

I personally have stopped looking at ads on the Google search engine results page because they are so often what I consider spam sites with nothing but additional paid links to be clicked on.

Hopefully this will open up the market for legitimate advertisers!