Landing Page Optimisation Blog

Another month passed by and our SEM showcase rocked again: We are still making some gooood money! Have a look a last month’s performance:

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Every month my little affiliate page makes more money and becomes more profitable. This is not a self runner! Its some work involved, not too much, but you have to spend some time on it. You have to check the performance and optimize bids constantly, at least once a week. I would do it every single day if more money was involved. But after some rounds of optimization the campaign is very stable now and I can let it run for a while without shivering or panic.

Since I started posting about this showcase I experienced growing competition in this sector! I think we – let’s call it “inspired” – some affiliates to try a little flower page themselves in the hard online flower delivering industry, hehe.

Unfortunately most of these guys do NOT use any kind of keyword tracking. Why is that? Let me give you a hint: I think its almost impossible to do profitable SEM without keyword tracking, especially in areas with high competition like this. So people: Try your flower pages if you like, but please do yourself a favor and use keyword tracking!

To be honest with you: I never expected to make good money with this showcase anyway, due to high competition from advertiser’s SEM agencies. But we are above 30% return on investment – constantly!

Now you give it a try: Build good landingpages and conquer your niches!

May was definitely the best month for our showcase so far! This was no big surprise, since the week before Mother’s Day is the most important business time for flower deliverers. Lets have a look at the numbers first:

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This month the overall search volume for keywords like “flowers, flower delivery, etc” was extraordinary high. Due to Mother’s Day we tripled the turnover of our little showcase and doubled the profit! I added another pic showing the run for Mother’s Day on a daily base:

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Mother’s Day was on May, 11th this year. The whole week before was amazing. Ad impressions were almost 10 times higher than a week before and afterwards. Also the conversion rates were higher during this period: Everybody was mad about sending flowers around the globe! But also the competition raise during this period. I had to go up to 80 Euro-Cents per click only to mantain the average position of my ads.

I made a little mistake at the end of the hype: The two days before Mother’s Day I lost some money, cause the search volume was still very high, but conversion rates were going down dramatically. Explanation: People want to get the flowers delivered just in time on Mother’s Day – but this is only possible if they order two days before! Otherwise the flowers come one or two days later. Nobody wants that. So  people go on looking out for flower shops that do deliver in time, they find any and go on searching. I knew about it, and reduced bids by 30 %. This was way too less! I should have reduced bids by 60 to 80 % for these two days in order to stay profitable…

Find out more about trends and bidding strategies in our next posts. Stay tuned! 

Now the third month is over and our showcase seems out to be a real performance runner! (-; Lets have a look at the numbers and go into detail afterwards (click on the image to get a larger one):

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In February we started the project, set up a new SEM campaign with very generic keywords. Of course we lost some money – but this is the way it goes! In the beginning its important to collect enough clicks and statistics for further optimization.

In March we already reached the black numbers and made some 40% return on investment. I did it by looking at the performance of each AdGroup in the Online Statistics of Look@Landingages and then set new bids in the AdWords interface.

April was even better! I decreased the fees for Google and (unfortunately) the number of click-ins. But the traffic now is better targeted. You can also see that optimizing bids can result in less commissions in total (bidding down unprofitable keywords), but nevertheless optimization increased the profit (higher bids for good performing keywords / AdGroups)!

By-the-way: If you compare the numbers for March in this chart with the ones some weeks ago, you will notice that the commissions for March are still growing! This is because some of the users do not “convert” instantly (transaction on advertiser’s site within 2 hours after click-in). Some of them return to your site after a while and do the transaction later. We call this “post transactions”. Look@Landingpages always shows transactions on the click-in day (and keyword), that caused the first contact with the user!

The next month May will be very thrilling, cause it’s Mothers day, the most important time for online flower delivery! (-;

My little page “www.blumenkuriere.de” is the first affiliate project I set up to test Look@Landingpages with. It’s a little offer comparison site for flower delivery in Germany.
You might know the AdWords tutorials? They use made up examples with flowers, like this. I thought it would be fun trying to have a real world example, with flowers, that makes real money! Well, it does! (-;

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I opened up a new zanox account and looked out for advertisers: 4 flower bringing companies, perfect. I checked Google Keyword Tool for common keywords in the German online flower business and registered a new domain afterwards.

Most of the work was creating a good, quality landingpage. This took some time, but finally I had something up.
Now again keyword retrieval time. I didn’t spent too much time in thinking about good, creative keywords. I simply pasted everything the Keyword Tool offered me, gave it a good structure of adgroups and added adtexts.

Due to high competition on my selected keywords I decided to give it a little extra work on increasing the qualityscore of my landingpage. I wrote texts including these keywords, added them to title, headings and meta descriptions.

Then I started the Adwords campaign and let it run for about 2 weeks in order to collect enough clicks to have a good data basis for optimization. I checked Look@Landingpages for online statistics about my flower campaigns. With this information i killed bad keywords (a lot of clicks but no transactions) and increased bids on Google ones (profitable and not on top position on Google search). I repeated this process one or two times to make the campaign stable and profitable.

Have a look at the performance over the last weeks:

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Quite good, isn’t it? Now i started to have a look at the click performance of the page itself. I checked click-in / click-out ratio in order to optimize the placement of the ads on my page. I tried different banners and found out that for this page no banners at all work out! But contextual implementation of partnerlinks did very good. The average CTR (click trough rate) of my page now is constantly above 100%, meaning that I don’t loose people on the way to advertisers site:

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Eventually I get even more click outs than in! So a good landingpage can make more out of your SEM traffic! Nice side effect. (-;

Optimization went on. I compared the performance of all advertisers on my side in order to change the placement of ads for the different advertisers. I found out, that i got highest overall commission from an advertiser that didn’t have the most prominent placement on my site. So i changed the arrangement and made a little extra turnover…. (-;

UPDATE, 21. April 2008:

Two weeks later and the performance looks even better! Post transactions (user clicks on ads one day and does transaction another day) plus some new bids over the past days increased the profit of our little showcase. Have a look at the numbers now! (-;

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