While "selling" to people using Facebook isn’t always the best idea if you want to maintain a good brand reputation, Facebook does of course offer advertising, which gives you the opportunity to do that without spamming your "friends" or "fans". 

WebProNews recently sat down with Janet Driscoll Miller of Search Mojo, who spoke a little about this and using landing pages within the social network. 

Are you putting enough thought into your landing pages? If not, it’s probably the main reason your conversions, or more importantly your revenue, aren’t higher. At PubCon in Las Vegas, WebProNews spoke with Brad Geddes, Founder of PPC training firm bgTheory about advanced PPC and landing page optimization. 

Why Landing Page Optimization is Critical

Microsites are commonly used by brands in online marketing. Dynamic Logic, a firm that evaluates the effectiveness of branded microsites, says that 7.8% of people become aware of a campaign’s message who otherwise would not have, when there is a microsite involved.

With the holiday season on the way, online retailers are obviously going to be looking for big sales. A lot of retailers are turning to Facebook and Twitter to help in that department, but if you sell goods online, there’s no better place to start than on the site itself.

Landing page optimization and multivariate testing are two elements of online marketing that go together, and can make a world of difference when it comes to revenue. It’s a simple concept. Test different versions of landing pages, and tweak them based on what works.

While the concept behind testing and optimizing is simple in theory, the results that can come with enough attention to these things, can have a tremendous impact on a business’s success.

There have been a couple of videos recently highlighted on Google company blogs that AdWords advertisers should pay attention to if their conversions are not where they want them to be. These videos deal with landing pages and ad copy.

It took a long time for big companies to enter the world of search marketing, and once they did there was sudden fierce competition for the moms and pops out there eking it out online. Now, as then, those same moms and pops can outmaneuver the big boys by capitalizing on bigger company weaknesses. Today’s advantage: landing pages.

There’s an extra factor in the Quality Score for AdWords clients, tied into the speed (or lack thereof) of their landing pages.

So, while perusing Google’s Hot Trends today I noticed a particular brand of digital camera was one of the top gainers in search queries: the Polaroid T730 Compact 7mp digital camera. Curious as to what’s so special about it, I googled it, only to embark on one frustrating journey.

There’s an art to landing pages but the end goal is the same for all of them: Getting the prospective visitor to  take a desired action. Accomplishing this is a matter of patience, thorough testing, and intuiting a visitor’s desire.

(Coverage of the ACCM conference continues at WebProNews Videos.  Keep an eye on WebProNews for more notes and videos from the event this week.)

Thanks to the diligence of a marketer (i.e., not to an announcement from Google), it is now known that Google instituted a new factor in determining the quality score for AdWords ads: landing page load time. In brief: slow landing page load times negatively impact quality scores, which increases minimum bids and ad placement rankings.

Raise conversions by 55% you say? That’s what Marketing Sherpa says in the promo copy for their new Landing Page Handbook.

Your budget just took a charge for a click, and a potential conversion will hit your landing page in a second. Session panelists at SES San Jose talked about what those arrivals should find when they land.

Michael Mattis has nine hints about landing page optimization that should make the lives of site publishers a little easier.

Fewer clicks led to more conversions when outdoor outfitter Cabela’s made a change that SEO pros should recognize, and businesses should employ.

I wrote before about creating landing pages completely focused on the use of words that your customers use.

Google now hosts AdWords landing pages for those people who don’t have a website of their own.

A landing page is the page that visitors first see after becoming curious enough to click on a link to your site. The link may be found on search engine results pages, within a specifically-targeted email, on the site’s navigation toolbar or within another website.

When a prospective client uses the internet to search for a product, he or she usually types a keyword or a phrase into a search engine and uses the results to find what he or she desires. If your ad is among those listings, you therefore have a much better shot at having prospective clients visit your website to find out what information you have, and what you are offering.

Marketers are investing a lot of money in PPC ads, but it appears that too many of them are neglecting the quality of their landing pages.