Look@Landingpages Blog

On Monday next week (June, 2nd) will be the Affiliate TactixX in Munich. It’s a meeting of publishers, merchants and networks. We will present Look@Landingpages to the audience and we invite all of you to use our new keyword tracking tool! I will be there also, so please contact me there if you see me and are interested in testing it!

UPDATE: You can read again our (german) presentation of Look@Landingpages Kristin was presenting at the TactixX. Find it here: Look@Landingpages auf der Affiliate TactixX 08. I think the presentation very short and tells you exactly how the tool works.

History of all video tips. I decided to post all videos here for those of you who missed some out or like to watch them again!

1. SEM Rap by 101


2. Matt Cutts talking about snippets

To be continued …

Keyword tracking means: Full controll over your AdWords campaigns! Look@Landingpages shows you the important part of information, that no other tool can do at this very moment. Take a look at this!

Switch between your AdWords and your Look@Landingpages acount in order to optimize campaigns for maximum profit. Increase bids for profitable adgroups and keywords, decrease bids for bad keywords or delete them. After a little bit of campaign optimization you should see amazing results.

Apply for Look@Landingpages now, it’s a free keyword tracking tool for SEM affiliates!

This is a common mistake. If you see click-ins and SE-costs in the online statistics but no click-outs and no transactions at all, go on reading! A screenshot of the problem would look like this:

A lot of affiliates have a big, grown chaos in their zanox accounts. Good practise is, adding a new advertising space if you start a new website. bad practise is, taking the partner links of a former adspace to avoid going through the confirmation process. Normally there is no technical problem with this. But Look@Landingpages relies on a “clean” account structure!

Each Look@Landingpages account is connected to one specific adspace. You can add one LPT account per adspace, but each account will only track transactions belonging to partner programs of the connected adspace!

To get this right, you have to replace all partner links belonging to other adspaces by correct partner links for this adspace. In the worst case you will have to get confirmed again to some of your programs with the adspace you created the LPT account for …

A lot of people asked me weather they could use or copy the template of our showcase for small SEM projects. Here you go!

Download Landingpage Template: Microsite 1.2 »

The template consists of one single page of HTML, some images, a browser switch in javascript and two CSS files. It is just a little microsite or doorway page. It has shown out to be good for:

• small offer comparison sites and niches,


• indirect SEM with landingpages,


• high quality scores at AdWords,


• search engine optimisation (fine code),


• high click-through rates (on page navigation),

Before using it, you have to edit two pictures and add your content to the page. You have to:

1. Add your logo to the image “bg_menu.gif”,


2. change the look of the headings and titles by editing “bg_title.gif”,


3. change the CSS files if you like to go into more detail,


4. write some good content and add it to the HTML page,


5. upload all files and folders to your webspace!

License: Feel free to download and use it in whatever way you like, except copying MY showcase or content and please respect the restrictions below! If you don’t agree, then don’t use the template! It’s that simple.

Restrictions: By using the template you accept the following terms of usage…

• You are not allowed to use the template to advertise for other affiliate networks like Affili.net or CJ, ONLY zanox partner links are permitted.


• You are not allowed to use the template to advertise for flower deliverers like Fleurop, FloraPrima, Blume2000, Valentins or Aquarelle in GERMANY. Other countries are permitted.


• You have to keep the two backlinks in the footer, don’t remove them.

Sorry guys for these additional restrictions, but I want to prevent more “klones” of my showcase out there! Be creative and use your own ideas to make up NEW pages – don’t just copy the showcase! Plus I don’t think Google will tolerate several look-alike affiliate pages bidding on the same keywords. Hehe. Also be aware of legal restrictions for websites and publishers in your specific country.

Update: There are currently more than 20 affiliates using my free landingpage template! I picked up some nice examples, find it here:

1. Our Showcase called Blumenversand.
   


2. Page about Vero Moda Fashion.


3. A nice Champagne page!


4. Another page about Plants.


5. Webspace provider compared.


6. Blog about shoes, German: “Schuhe“.

If you produced a nice example with my landingpages template yourself, please let me know, the best projects receive a backlink from here.

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):

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! (-;

For those of you who wanna download the performance statistics we implemented a raw data download section within Look@Landingpages.

Go to performance review -> raw data download. Select the data fields you need and specify a download format. We offer you CSV, XML and Excel files. Statistic geeks will like the highly adjustable pivot table.

Use these downloads to archive or analyze your campaigns performance in detail!

The online statistics are the heart of our new tracking tool. Select performance review in Look@Landingpages interface to watch them. Here you find all information needed to interpret and optimize the performance of your AdWords campaigns.

You can watch the performance from several points of view:

• campaign


• adgroup


• keyword


• partner programme


• advertising media


• month


• calendar week and


• day

Most interesting are the groupings by campaign, adgroup and keyword, cause they are essential for optimizaiton. Have a look at the screenshots:

The navigation works similar to the Adwords interface. You can click trough the statistics: A click on a campaign will show you the performance per adgroup, click on an adgroup and you will find the performance per keyword.

Now if you open your Adwords account in a second browser window or tab, you can sort the data in both windows the same way. This makes it very easy to quickly set new bids for adgroups or keywords.

MCC accounts can’t be added to a Look@Landingpages account. MCC accounts consist of other AdWords accounts. They do not contain campaigns themselves.

If you try to add an MCC account, there will be no campaigns selectable for landingpage tracking! In this case deactivate the created Look@Landingpages account and specify another standard AdWords account. Of course you can add one LPT account for every sub account of an MCC.

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! (-;

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:

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:

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! (-;