GeekAffiliate

Affiliates often use pay-per-click (PPC) programs like Google AdWords to place ads for the products they are promoting. Although some affiliates can drive traffic directly to the product owner’s site, most send the traffic to sites they own. The usual scheme is to create a single landing page that links directly to the product’s order page, with no other links on the page. In fact, it’s not unusual to create several variations of the same landing page for tracking and testing purposes, but all follow the same general pattern.

Recent AdWords changes are throwing this time-honored method into disarray, however. As documented over at Inside AdWords, the quality of a landing page now has a greater impact on the advertiser’s overall Quality Score. This is important, you see, because the advertiser’s minimum bid values vary with the Quality Score (QS). In short, advertisers with low QS pay more for their ads. If the price of the ads goes up too much then the cost of attracting eyeballs to the affiliate landing pages starts to outweight the profits generated from affiliate sales. For examples of how this affects affiliate advertisers, see the extensive posting by Michael Gray.

Quality Guidelines

If you’re an affiliate who depends on PPC to make money — it’s often the quickest way to get going with affiliate marketing — then the first thing you should do is carefully read these two pages:

• Google AdWords Landing Page and Site Quality Guidelines
• What is Google’s affiliate advertising policy?

The latter explains why most affiliate marketers use their own landing pages rather than directing visitors to the main product site — when multiple advertisers place ads whose display URL (the URL that the user sees in the ad) is the same, only one of those ads gets shown per search query.

The first link, though, is the one that really interests us, because it talks about what makes a good landing page in Google’s eyes as opposed to what it makes it good in the affiliates eyes.

Content is King

Once again, Google shows its bias towards quality content. Look at the headings for the three sections of the landing page guidelines:

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

The simple truth is that most affiliate landing pages fail these three tests. Most just rehash the same content, the product’s sales page. Those that ask for user’s information (the typical squeeze page) present nothing more than a simple “we’ll never sell your information” privacy policy. And many landing pages are not part of the overall site. This is why such pages end up with low QS values.

So what is an affiliate advertiser supposed to do?

Pre-Sell the Product with Landing Sites

The solution is to place more emphasis on pre-selling the product. Instead of creating landing pages, create content-rich landing sites with this kind of information:

• Authentic and original stories, reviews and testimonials about the product. (You do use the product you’re pushing, don’t you?)
• Free samples, previews or demos of the product. Promoting an e-book? Try to get a sample chapter (ideally with your affiliate ID embedded in its links) to distribute. Or if that’s not possible, make up your own document describing the e-book in detail — table of contents, summary of each chapter, etc.
• Details about you and the seller. Put a human face to the site: let the visitor learn who you are, why you’re promoting the product, and why they can trust the product’s creator.
• Direct links to the order page. Many affiliates simply direct visitors to the product owner’s sales page, which is somewhat redundant and often self-defeating. After convincing the visitor to buy, make it easy for them to do the transaction.

It’s also good policy to avoid intrusive marketing gimmicks on these sites. You can’t put pop-ups on the actual landing pages themselves, but you’ll be tempted to put them on the other pages of your landing site — resist that temptation.

More Work for Affiliates

Building a useful landing site around one or more landing pages (be sure to watch out for duplicate content issues with the pages themselves — you might want to exclude the main search engine robots from those pages, though be careful not to exclude the AdWords crawler) definitely takes more work than building a good landing page, which is itself an art. But if you’re serious about increasing your QS and lowering your costs, it’ll be worth the investment in time. Besides, the more effort you make in pre-selling the visitor the more likely you are going to be able to convert that visitor into a customer.

It’s interesting to note that many AdSense publishers create mini-sites to build income streams from content pages. The same techniques they use to keep the visitor on the site and to encourage repeat visits can be used with affiliate landing sites. You could even explore AdSense arbitrage with your affiliate landing site, but that’s a tricky game to play and you’re probably better off to concentrate on getting visitor to buy the product instead of clicking ads.

Technorati Tags: AdSense, AdWords, Google, affiliate, marketing, selling, landing pages, content