I see this question get asked all the time. “Do I need a landing page and why?”
- Stats – Even if you just iframe or frame in the landing page you still get all the statistics on your visitors. This will of course help you in generating invalid click reports if you are doing ppc as well as many other analytical aspects.
- Geotargeting – Depending on the offer geo targeting can be huge. Check out this site for an example. See how at the top it greets the user saying special mobile offer for $state. That is super hot and will help “pre-sell” the user
- Separating out offers – this is probably the biggest single reason IMO to have a landing page.
Lets use for instance the ring tone verticle. There are offers that work better with sprint and not with verizon and there are offers that work with verizon but not tmobile… ect… this is where you need to do your homework.
Another good example is the dating verticle. You have offers for Asian Dating, Interracial Dating, African American Dating, Gay Dating, Mature Dating, etc… You need to separate these offers out.
- Landing Page Quality Score – Its hard to get a good landing page quality score when your just sending it directly to the offer or framing in a page with nothing in the noframes tags.
So then when don’t you want to make a landing page? Well pretty much any time you are adding a un needed step to the buying process. For instance if you are bidding on the keyword of “Verizon Ringtones” Then obviously you do not want to add another step of making the user select Verizon as there carrier. The same would be true if you were bidding on “Asian Dating” for dating offers. You would still want to host the site so you can get analytical data but just frame it in.
- Comment Likes 
- Comment Dislikes
March 9, 2009 at 4:03 am
thanks for the post. i have designed a landing page and i need to write a review on a product. i am not good at copywriting and want you to recommend me someone who can write a good presell review.
June 4, 2007 at 3:40 am
This post is awesome. I really must read your blog more
(and no, this isn’t a spam comment even if it looks like one lol)
May 9, 2007 at 7:56 pm
Brro, so much of this info is freaking priceless. I’ve come back to this post too many times. I wish there was a way to personalize someone else’s blog so that you could come back to your favorite posts when you visit .. get dillsy on that!
April 15, 2007 at 4:22 pm
my landing pages range from OK to GREAT. What are some of the other categories?
April 9, 2007 at 3:25 am
I got once Geotargeting scropt whith huge database of countries but now I lost it. Can someone point oit some script like this, most preferably in PHP.
April 6, 2007 at 8:57 pm
true dat. I feel the same man.
April 3, 2007 at 5:18 am
same here
March 20, 2007 at 7:55 pm
How specific is good to go on GeoTargeting? When I was living in boston it would often geotarget me ads saying “tewskbury” which isnt close at all.
March 20, 2007 at 12:46 pm
Thanks for the tips, I am definitely going to try these out
March 20, 2007 at 10:35 am
I would stress that the key to a great landing page is testing. Never stop testing. Never assume that you have stumbled upon the perfect mix of content and images, the perfect copy, etc. Use the Google website optimizer, use Crazyegg, and just never stop testing. It is our belief that no landing page is ever 100% “optimized”.
March 18, 2007 at 11:51 pm
MaxMind Apache + C Module
March 18, 2007 at 11:51 pm
Yep. I’ve noted that one of my landing pages actually got PR after only using adwords because other sites picked it up and linked to it.
March 18, 2007 at 11:50 pm
Exactly. Every dollar counts and for something so easy to catch/report as invalid clicks it’s a no brainer!!!
March 18, 2007 at 11:50 pm
PPC + Affil. offers + TIME = Money
Note TIME is the biggest thing
March 18, 2007 at 11:49 pm
Analytics, AW Stats, and Crazy Egg. I use them all together.
March 18, 2007 at 11:49 pm
Exactly! If people listen to his advice and do their own testing and researc on offers they could make some serious cash.
March 18, 2007 at 11:48 pm
To bad it’s no longer EASY to make a lot with the amazon feed.
March 18, 2007 at 8:39 pm
true enough.
March 16, 2007 at 8:36 am
Some do but most don’t, they don’t mind it if you’re sending them free traffic.
March 16, 2007 at 8:35 am
Shoe linked to a pepperjam article about how they do it:
http://www.shoemoney.com/2006/12/15/yahoo-search-marketing-credit-of-1000000-still-dont-think-you-should-do-ppc-analytics/
March 16, 2007 at 4:13 am
I think it’s important to test linking directly to a client’s site versus linking to a landing page and then just comparing the results, using whatever works best.
If you’re talking about a SEM campaign then some keywords might perform better with, and others without a landing page and so you can optimize accordingly.
Sometimes the results will surprise you – to me it makes sense that directly linking to a shop website will result in more conversions than making the user go to a landing page first – but this is definitely not always the case !
March 16, 2007 at 1:53 am
I would like to see that info about how you detect the click fraud too, that would be a great article.
March 15, 2007 at 10:44 pm
Not only that. Just about any schmuck and give tips on affiliate marketing but Shoe’s tips are more valuable because he really does has some experience in this field.
March 15, 2007 at 12:34 pm
That’s why I come. Shoemoney tips = more money for me.
March 15, 2007 at 8:03 am
To target the offers to foreign people (as most offers target US only) and wouldnt you rather choose what to show the visitor than just something random or worse nothing. but also to track for “invalid clicks” as in sending you traffic from australia when u only have US targetted.
March 15, 2007 at 7:44 am
I like Analytics .. usually combine it with AWstats. If you don’t have a lot of traffic, Sitemeter works just as well.
March 14, 2007 at 10:00 pm
Ever tried Crazy Egg?
March 14, 2007 at 10:00 pm
$state aint working here so I don’t know if its that great
March 14, 2007 at 9:59 pm
I’d assume with stat trackers
March 14, 2007 at 9:58 pm
If that isn’t the truth
March 14, 2007 at 1:29 am
Shoemoney can you do a post sometime on the subject of click fraud. Specifically what invalidating criteria do Google etc. accept when you present them with the evidence.
March 14, 2007 at 12:49 am
What do you use for geotargeting though?
March 13, 2007 at 11:32 pm
I have to fully concur.
March 13, 2007 at 11:30 pm
Wow, that geotargetting really doesn’t work on my end.
March 13, 2007 at 8:51 pm
Some programs require a landing page, don’t they?
March 13, 2007 at 3:37 pm
thanks you so much shoe
March 13, 2007 at 3:22 pm
Here is another reason — you own the page. Landing pages can get organic SE traffic even after PPC become unprofitable, (affiliate links can rank too but thats a whole other can of worms.)
March 13, 2007 at 2:31 pm
Good tips i think one of the biggest money drains people miss out on is reporting “invalid clicks” and getting that money back as even for people just starting in PPC that could mean getting a few bucks back to use the next month and for the big boys it could mean thousands!! Good tips!
March 13, 2007 at 1:01 pm
I do this with a ringtone site I’ve got, but the $state is a nice touch. Thanks for the suggestion, SM. I’m gonna go make a few changes now.
March 13, 2007 at 12:52 pm
Totally unrelated, but what time zone is this blog running at? Just wondering if it’s a DST thing or you’re no where near the East coast.
March 13, 2007 at 12:29 pm
Whatever gets the job done!
March 13, 2007 at 12:29 pm
thanks for the feedback
March 13, 2007 at 12:28 pm
its not widely available now but many ringtone companies are offering apis now. Just ask your affiliate manager if they have any api or datafeeds. Many programs in commission junction have datafeeds. A good place to start and play is with the amazon AWS
March 13, 2007 at 12:26 pm
Great tips. I have the unusual habit of using Wordpress to create landing pages, though you could just as easily do it some other way.
There are several one-column themes which work very well for the landing page format.
March 13, 2007 at 12:10 pm
I’ve always had much better luck creating my own landing page then linking straight to the merchant (even before Google made it harder/more costly to link straight to the merchant).
March 13, 2007 at 11:56 am
I’ve yet to try PPC campaigns w/ affiliate deals, but there are some good ideas here that I’m probably going to try and use.
March 13, 2007 at 11:38 am
What’s everyone using for Statistic collecting? MBL seems spacey and Analytics crapped out yesterday on me (guess you get what you pay for). Any good suggestions?
March 13, 2007 at 10:56 am
And of course Photoshop skills combined with your HTML and CSS will help make your pages look nicer.
March 13, 2007 at 10:53 am
I think the question here is whether or not an affiliate should use a landing page. I think Shoe agrees with me – in both cases he presents a page of different carriers and another with just Verizon. Both are landing pages.
I agree with this one – traffic should be sent to your site first (v. sending it to a merchant directly through an affiliate link on the SEs or a redirect page). And the reason for this is twofold: a) you have a chance to keep the user (via email offer) or b) you can easily swap out merchants (or have a couple of them) on the page. Obviously, done this way, you have more power over your advertisers.
Of course, the downside is that your conversions might plummet (extra clicks; site with less trust). But with some tweaking, you might actually make more.
March 13, 2007 at 10:49 am
Thanks for going into greater detail as to how you “track and test,” things you’ve preached from the beginning.
March 13, 2007 at 10:39 am
Buy a domain, get a host, get a book on HTML/PHP/CSS and create single pages for you to send PPC traffic to.
March 13, 2007 at 10:37 am
“or framing in a page with nothing in the noframes tags.”
I would surmise you’d have to put some content and not just go with emptiness around the frame.
March 13, 2007 at 9:48 am
You can still get a good quality score with an inline frame? That seems like you would get nailed because of the lack of content. I haven’t tried it yet though, so I don’t know for certain.
Good advice though.
March 13, 2007 at 8:37 am
Hi Shoe,
In line with posters #2 & 3 except in plain newbie english:
How does one create custom affiliate landing pages ( on one’s own server) instead of having to redirect to the merchants landing page?
Thanks.
March 13, 2007 at 5:31 am
Jeremy, just some feedback, I think that the posts where you give tips about internet and affiliate marketing are the best ones, its what makes your blog unique and the reason why (i guess) most readers come here.
Thanks for that.
March 13, 2007 at 4:04 am
Yeah, if you could elaborate on that aspect of landing pages, it would be VERY helpful
March 13, 2007 at 3:24 am
I am learning and reading the stuff. I still didnt get how to make custom affiliates pages. Do they use any APIs if yes then from where to get my hands on those APIs. I can program abit and design aswell. Just need a direction from where should i start developing these kind of pages.
March 13, 2007 at 1:56 am
Nice tips on the issue of landing page. Some people are just off the loop for it though. I guess they should read carefully, rather than learning the hard way.