Target Your Click Throughs Carefully
With ad services like Google Adwords, having control of the page a viewer sees once they click on your ad means you have the advantage of presenting a targeted message.
One of the worst mistakes you can do is to create a compelling headline and brief description, and then just send someone to an all-encompassing home page — that momentum is lost and a visitor is often confused by their choices.
The message on the home page — unless you have a very lead-generation specific website with only one presented message — is not often an extension of the ad message that had the visitor interested enough to click in the first place. That confusion is a “road block” to converting that visitor to your objective.
So it makes sense that the page they see accurately reflects the advertising message … you should use a page that specifically meets this purpose.
However, be careful to TEST that it works!
I clicked on an ad on a web page yesterday (from within Google Mail) … for a bookkeeping company. They had created a specific page for that ad. However, the page I saw had this message:
You are not authorized to view this resource.
You need to login.
Oh no … lost sale. Road block. Crash. Wasted money spent on that click!
Most likely, the person creating the ad landing page was logged in, and didn’t even realise the potential for this type of error. How much money will they waste until they realise this problem?
Admittedly, some visitors may then use the navigation to click on the home page and track down what they were after. But you’re at the mercy of their resourcefulness, and that’s a dangerous place to be, especially when your home page is not prepared to carry that same targeted message.
So … don’t just use your home page as an ad landing page, unless it is very consumer targeted. And make sure that if you do have a specific page, you logout of your web content management system and test the page just as a visitor would see it!
Optimising images online
One of the graphic aspects that business site owners sometimes overlook on their website is using HTML to change the display size of an image or graphic.
Here’s an example: on a website today, I noticed a tiny image loading really slowly (even though I’m surfing the web on broadband and the rest of the page loaded quite fast).
It was a sure giveaway that the image was really large and that it had been resized (width and height settings) in the HTML coding to display much smaller.
The display size was tiny: just 186 pixels wide by 25 pixels high.
When I viewed the actual image, it was a whopping 3456 pixels wide by 2304 pixels high!
In total area, that’s 4,650 pixels at the small size vs 7,962,624 pixels at the large size. So, in effect, the display size was less than 6 percent of the uploaded image size.
That causes a few problems:
- The image loads very slowly, making the website visitor’s experience worse because images aren’t displayed quickly
- With the way the image was displayed (186×25), the proportions have distorted the original image to a more landscape shape (squashing the image) — which results in a poorer display
- In turn, that reduces the “professional” appearance of the website (which you want to maximise)
- It also means that instead of “serving” up an image of around 2kb, the image is 3.56Mb (3,567kb) — that’s a lot of data allowance being wasted (which you might need to pay for!)
Any kind of resizing will generally make the image display look like it’s of lower quality.
So what should have happened?
BEFORE the image was uploaded to the server and displayed via the HTML code, it should have been resized to the exact display size. That’s what “optimising” an image is all about: making sure it is the optimal size for how you’re going to display it.
How do you do that?
The image should be opened in an image editor (offline editors like Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, Fireworks, the free Picasa etc; or online free editors/apps like Picnik or Photoshop Express) — cropped and adjusted as required and then exported/saved at the size it will be used online (186×25 pixels).
The cropping is important so there’s no squashing/distortion of the original picture. And also, a good web graphics operator would have lightened this image a fair bit, as the original was quite dark (so it’s hard to make out what it is supposed to be).
That would then create a tiny file (under 2kb as mentioned), at the size it will be used (”100% sizing”) on the webpage.
I actually cropped, lightened and resized the image as a test, and the resulting optimised image turned out to be 1.75kb.
So why does this kind of problem happen?
Usually because it’s a non-experienced person who has edited and uploaded the changes to the website. I can tell from this file that it was taken with a high end Canon EOS 350D camera — which is why such a large image (around 8 megapixels) was produced.
They then grabbed the image, included it in the page design, resized it within the HTML to the tiny size, and uploaded the image and new page coding (and probably wondered why it took so long!).
In the middle, they simply missed the step to properly prepare the image (optimise it).
An optimised image means page loading is faster, visitors are not slowed down by an image “taking forever” to display and there’s no excess data usage on the server (potentially saving 100’s of Mb of download data).
In this case, it’d save around 3,565kb for EVERY visitor to the home page — even with just 100 visitors per day (which is probably a conservative estimate for the site in question), that would add up to over 10.6 GIGABYTES of data saved every month!
For all of these reasons — make sure YOUR images are optimised on your web pages!
Cheap Adwords tactic in crowded market
Flying up to Sydney today for our quarterly Platinum mastermind meeting, I noticed an interesting use of Adwords by an advertiser on the in-flight Virgin Blue television service.
The advertiser was Quickflix Movie Rentals, who have an online DVD rental business. It’s a pretty competitive field.
However, the call to action in the ad was to ask flyers to Google “Q” — and then Quickflix would simply bid on the letter “Q” as a sponsored ad.
Much easier to remember than their name. Just go to Google and type in the letter Q.
And it instantly takes virtually all competitors off the search results page… the ONLY advertisers were Quickflix, and a comparison service recommending Quickflix (obviously there’s some room for smart competitors or affiliates here).
On top of that, rather than having to pay a small fortune for popular keywords in their category (they’re ranked number 10 position for “online movie rentals”), they only have to pay a comparatively tiny amount to rank number one in their search results for “Q”, as noone else is bidding on this keyword (keyletter??).
I’m not sure if Quickflix use this in other offline advertising, but it’s certainly a cost-effective way get people to only have to type in a single letter to be one-click from the right website!
Peeking Behind TinyURL
Do you know of TinyURL.com? The service that takes a really long link and creates a very short version?
One of the great things about TinyURL.com is the creation of a really short name, which is great for several reasons, such as using in print, emails, newsletters, forum posts, etc. It’s also used for cloaking/masking affiliate links, more about that in a minute.
But this really short name is also one of the frustrations for people using the service: as the link is represented by a mix of six letters and numbers, you never really can tell where it’s gonna head.
Until now.
For example, I just created a link to this post (http://www.deankennedy.com/blog/peeking-behind-tinyurl/) with TinyURL.
That resulted in: http://tinyurl.com/2sttxj
But later on, will you remember what 2sttxj is related to? Not likely!
And web visitors will never know what’s at the other end of the link. More uncertainly equals less clicks. Especially in the affiliate world, where this is a crude way to mask an affiliate link. Worse, you’re relying on a third party (in this case, the tinyURL website/creators) to keep offering the service free. Otherwise your links may disappear/die. You’re better off with your own system for easy-to-remember links or to deal with the need to cloak/mask the destination (without such a preview feature!).
But for end-user interaction with TinyURL links, TinyURL.com has come to the rescue!
Instead of using http://tinyurl.com/2sttxj you simply use http://preview.tinyurl.com/2sttxj
This will take you to a page that shows you the link before you click on it. Whenever you see a regular TinyURL.com link, you can copy the link into your address bar, and manually add in the “preview.” — it will still work this way. But there’s an even better option: when I visited TinyURL.com, I turned on a cookie so that, by default, all TinyURL.com links automatically display a preview first (you can turn it off again if you want to).
That will reveal the page that the link will be taking you to as its final destination.
Now there are of course other “short URL” services that compete with TinyURL.com that don’t have this feature. However, TinyURL.com is one of the popular options so it’s one of the more likely services you’ll see.
So now with TinyURL.com links, you don’t have any uncertainty, nor do you have to guess! You get to see the final destination before you visit that page!