DirectLink or LP to Test?

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makethatmoney

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After you find a niche and do some KW research, do you build an LP or direct link to test how well the offer goes?

I'm wondering about building up QS and getting some decent results and data from direct linking with Yahoo, but not sure if it would be better to develop a full blow LP/site?

Thank you! :)
 


It depends on the offer and the keyword. Some offers are straight forward, and do ok direct linking. Some aren't.
If it's a niche with a lot of offers in it, I'll test out with an LP. Since I have to figure at least ONE of the offers will convert over ok.
 
Let's say it's a Green Tea offer (saturated and pretty straight forward/general) --

I just don't want to dump cash/time into developing a site but then realizing it's too saturated or expensive for me to play.
 
xmcp123 said:
It depends on the offer and the keyword. Some offers are straight forward, and do ok direct linking. Some aren't.
If it's a niche with a lot of offers in it, I'll test out with an LP. Since I have to figure at least ONE of the offers will convert over ok.
Click to expand...
I was waiting for the 'right' person to answer his question, and you did!

Talking about direct linking, won't it result in low qs & high bids? It might do 'ok' in the beginning though. I highly doubt its longitivity. What do u say?
 
I never use direct linking, especially if it is a saturated market. Simple reason being that I will end up paying through the nose to make my ads show up because Google wont allow 2 advertisers with the same display url to show in the same search. And if my campaign has no history, other direct linking competitors or the merchant who have the same url will show up first.
 
That makes sense. As far as Yahoo is concerned, is their algorithm similar? Would I have lower bids if I have a unique URL and LP, or even just iFrame the offer?

Thanks :)
 
makethatmoney said:
Let's say it's a Green Tea offer (saturated and pretty straight forward/general) --

I just don't want to dump cash/time into developing a site but then realizing it's too saturated or expensive for me to play.
Click to expand...
Green tea at this point is largely a battle of the landing pages and adcopy. You can't win without both. Everyone's running on (largely) the same set of keywords. So what makes your campaign more profitable than the others(especially if you start out at a lower payout)...yup. It's all in the landing page for that.

FatalError said:
I was waiting for the 'right' person to answer his question, and you did!

Talking about direct linking, won't it result in low qs & high bids? It might do 'ok' in the beginning though. I highly doubt its longitivity. What do u say?
Click to expand...
I don't think there's a penalization for direct linking. The issues come from
  1. some networks use a metarefresh that the bots see as a blank page
  2. A lot of offers use 100% graphical landers. With no text to read, and no deep pages...you guessed it. Shiite quality score.
 
Thanks xmcp - Is the quality score as advanced on Yahoo as with Google?

Should I still worry about creating additional content instead of graphical landers if I don't use Google at this point?
 
xmcp123 said:
  1. some networks use a metarefresh that the bots see as a blank page
Click to expand...

Correct me if I'm wrong here:
I usually check the merchant's page html to check if its a direct offer or a 'bridge' to another merchant. (a general look at the URLs in their code usually reveals this)
So it means I can *test* promote offers which are not 'metarefreshed' as you say. Correct?
 
makethatmoney said:
Thanks xmcp - Is the quality score as advanced on Yahoo as with Google?

Should I still worry about creating additional content instead of graphical landers if I don't use Google at this point?
Click to expand...
Yahoo=CTR.
and don't worry about it. Either way, normally a decent title and a few lines of text are enough to keep everything alive, even on Google. At least until the slap comes.

FatalError said:
Correct me if I'm wrong here:
I usually check the merchant's page html to check if its a direct offer or a 'bridge' to another merchant. (a general look at the URLs in their code usually reveals this)
So it means I can *test* promote offers which are not 'metarefreshed' as you say. Correct?
Click to expand...

I'm not talking about a metarefresh off the LP. I've only seen this once but it was actually a meta refresh from your affiliate link TO the lander for the merchant. Not sure if it's common practice.
 
So building an LP would be ideal for Yahoo as well to help QS and allow me to pre-sell and provide some information to buyers?
 
acemenace said:
I never use direct linking, especially if it is a saturated market. Simple reason being that I will end up paying through the nose to make my ads show up because Google wont allow 2 advertisers with the same display url to show in the same search. And if my campaign has no history, other direct linking competitors or the merchant who have the same url will show up first.
Click to expand...

I ran into this exact problem with an offer I was promoting. When I was direct linking I was paying around $1.25 per click, when I setup a landing page on my own URL I was paying around $.25 per click.
 
If you're seeing a profit I suggest start split testing. I've seen diet work better with a LP then without. I've seen a LP kill Payday Loans conversions. So every niche is different. But your landing page plays an even bigger role. How well is it truly selling an offer? I've taken an offer that converts like shit because the actual offer page just sucks. So you make a pre-sell that gets them excited and let them know the page of the offer isn't much to look at but it really works. Also placement on your page can improve your ctr greatly. Both CDF networks blog and diorex have quite a bit on landing page design. Also if you can get your hands on the Marketing Sherpa ebook it's very very good and has a ton of case studies of long copy vs. short.

Education + trial & error == Cash :)
 
Education + trial & error (cash) = more cash hopefully ;)

@maxor - Did you notice that change on Google alone, or on Yahoo as well?

@smaxor (hey just add an 's' - Thanks for the insight. I saw a tremendous profit on my first 6 clicks (made 2 sales) but have only gotten 1 sale since and that's in over another 100 clicks. Right now I'm in the red (probably by about $75-100 ($100 rev, $200 adspend) but it's with direct linking to a diet page.

Granted my KWs are very general, and I should probably spend more time on that.

Just trying to figure out where to spend the bulk of my time when starting a campaign.

It's pretty easy (I think) to pick a niche that is profitable and where there is potential, but do I spend days/weeks on generating a keyword list? How many KWs should I use?

After that do I spend a week or so building an LP? How often does the offer get taken down and then most of this work is wasted?

Just a bunch of noobie questions and I haven't really done anything "REAL" yet - Only had a couple successful direct linking campaigns, but I want to get into this more heavily and potentially make some actual cash from it.

Thanks guys :)
 
I think you should probably test with both an lp and without as suggested above. One other thing to note is that if the landing page for the merchant is general (some are really bad and just have a form with little to no graphics)....by creating your own landing page you can sell the product from many different angles related to the product. You could do 3 different landing pages with 3 different KW sets selling your product in different ways (these would be the outside the box KW sets once you start scaling and not just the main KWs).
 
direct linking works with yahoo SM and adcenter (facebook would be best with redirection maybe php redirection). Otherwise LP for the adwords monster
 
Ok, my advice on this issue. LP works for offers which are highly saturated or needs credit card details. For example me doing a direct linking to Green Tea page totally didnt work and it sucked. Me doing Direct linking to dating offers sucked because the landing page was all about entering their age and name etc, the user had to see why they should join to my offer etc. On the other hand one of my dieting offers I am running now has a great landing page with all the important information the customers need to know and that direct linking campaign is converting at around 3%.

So finally what you need to understand is that direct linking should be done just to check if the offers do convert, send 100 clicks to it and try and get few conversions. If it does, bang get a GREAT landing page done and a website around.

Also for google always buy two domain names for the same offer, use one for testing it for ppc and if you get slapped you don't have to worry about it and on the other build it up with conent over time and use that later on if google slaps you for your first domain.
 
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