A Practical Example - Setting Up An Adwords PPC Campaign To Advertise These Forums

[Clinton]

You're right, I don't want them to just register. As you know from my policy of deleting unused accounts, bottomline numbers is the last thing I'm looking for!

I'd like to see them posting. But the initial hurdle is getting them registered. I've sent you a PM about the reviews on webmaster forums. It's a good way of getting the webmaster types to join us.

In the meanwhile, here's the two landing pages. Page asking them to register | Page suggesting they browse

I did a couple of minor tweaks. What do you guys think?

[hooperman]

Can you make the button stand out a bit more? At the moment it blends too well with the existing colour scheme (looks good though!). getresponse and aweber have got striking contrasts going on with their buttons that catch the eye.

If you're thinking about targeting webmaster forums, I'd also target business forums too. Forums for affiliates (like affiliates4u) as well?

[tke71709]

I'd like to see them posting. But the initial hurdle is getting them registered.

I respectfully disagree

The initial hurdle is getting them to go from the landing page to the forums. After that your hurdle is to get them to register and post.

Like hooperman said, make the button stand out more, make it orange or something. I'm also not nuts about the graphic, for one it's tough to read the bottom circle text and for two there's no emotional resonance with it.

So some items to split test, the graphic and the button.

[JJMcClure]

I'm mindful of the saying about how camel is a horse designed by a committee, hehe. However, some good stuff is coming out of this. Gotta go out now though, catch up tomorrow.

[tke71709]

Clinton, seeing as this thread now has absolutely nothing to do with the original post I'd recommend splitting the thread.

[Clinton]

OK, will split it tomorrow. And make some changes to the camel tomorrow as it's too late now.

hoooperman, thanks for those example pages. Yes, there's scope to target business and affiliates sites too. I'd like to keep that separate to the PPC campaign that's looking for the types who don't hang around webmaster forums. I'm sending you a PM on this.

tke71709, the circle graphic isn't the most inspired. But does anyone have an alternate picture to use on the page? Or do we dispense with it altogether? Do you or hooperman want to come up with a button graphic?

[Clinton]

I've split this thread now. Am working on some changes to the two landing pages. As nobody has said anything more about the buttons I'll go ahead and try my hand out at creating a more colourful button.

[hooperman]

If you're split testing buttons, do you want to put this one in the mix?

[Andy]

Okay and here youse guys have done all this work and now I"m gonna come in and set you straight, right? Well, no. And that is the last thing I want to imply here. However I do have a couple of observations and suggestions.

First, this may be a project by committee but I think everyone has done very well thus far. For what it's worth I'm impressed. Since this thread is so long and has such great participation, I'd like to dispense with "who tossed this in credits" and just address the ideas themselves.

Differentiating the various markets was perfect. Also deciding what you want the visitor to do is a big milestone to me. I've seen too many folks wanting to do too many different things. Also, testing via adwords for different ads and optimizer for landing pages - guys you're melting my heart! Excellent.


About the graphic. I'm not a graphics guy. Not at all so take my suggestion here with a grain of salt. But to me the "For Sale" sign might be more direct. Anyone looking at it would make the connection in a flash. The graphic I uploaded is free clip art I found on the net. That's about as fancy as I care to get. :-)

The two landing pages: I'm not so sure I'd want to test "browse" and register" - Why not put both buttons side by side? I THINK they can still be tracked. Speaking of tracking... I scanned something about ROI but Clinton has come up with a tough one. Can we set some overall goals of what we would like to see? Let's say 100 new members - what would this be worth in PPC costs to you Clinton?

Back to testing (sorry) - in theory (generally speaking) each part of a page should be tested by itself. What should be tested first are the parts of the page with the biggest impact. On a sales page that would be Headline, Offer, Guarantee, P.S.

You can see the problem here. The good news is with optimizer we can also test entire pages. So one way to do this is to decide on a couple of overall approaches and then narrow things down as we get a better handle on things. And since we are already going in that direction...

Free is good and true but I wonder if this might pose a problem by arousing suspicion. If I read this page I'd be asking myself "What do they want?" "WHY is this all free?" "If this is really FREE why is someone paying to get me there?"

Questions like these are the basis of a type of copy called "reason why copy". We ask ourselves what the reader might be wondering and answer it for them. It might be a good idea to do this here.

I also agree that PPC is only one avenue. I'd want to reach out to other groups including business owners, accountants and even lawyers (sorry about my use of foul language here). People go to such professionals all the time about this kind of advice. Anyways, lets start with PPC and see what happens.

Andy

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[Clinton]

Register
Browse

Thanks for your input, Andy, and your PMs offering to help. It's much appreciated. I don't understand what you mean about the For Sale sign? You reckon we should have a For Sale sign? Wouldn't that confuse the punters?

I haven't formed an idea of how much I'm willing to pay per new member. Besides, the quality of the member matters. So someone who costs $50 and becomes a regular with thousands of posts is worth far more to us than a $2 member who makes one post and goes away. Measure of success has got to be a) whether the member is good enough to pass the initial post quality barriers to get signature and other privileges and b) how many posts he ends up making in the, say, first three months.

And that's the problem with testing. How do we easily test the impact of each page/design? Do we need to reconstruct the too complicated goal and work just on number of registrations?

"What the reader might be thinking":
1. Why is this free? What's the catch? (good one)
any more?

I'm all for reaching out to other groups and I'm happy to spend money on that. Anyone with any suggestions, a particular forum where you think it would be useful to advertise, a particular mailing list etc., please drop me a PM. For the purpose of this thread, of course, we're putting a "camel" together and it's shaping up well!