When running your AdWords campaigns, it’s important to have your landing pages as closely related to the search term and the ad text as possible. Firstly, this will serve to improve your quality scores and bring down your CPCs. Not bad. And from your visitor’s point of view, they’re more likely to sign up.
So through doing some work to create specific landing pages for your campaigns or adgroups, your costs go down, Google loves you, and your sales go up. Can’t be bad for a couple of hours’ work?

And it’s not really that hard work either. The DatingFactory have introduced a couple of great features to their admin panel that I’d recommend trying out on your sites.

Creating New Landing Pages

Once inside the Admin Panel, click on the site you want to create a new landing page for.  Then click on “Landing Pages” under “Promotional Materials”, and click on “Create New Campaign”.
Depending on the size of your campaigns, you may prefer to create specific pages at the AdGroup level instead? I prefer this, as you’re then able to be even more targeted.
So let’s say you’ve got a Regional Campaign, and in there you’ve got AdGroups for each major city. You can create a landing page specifically for London (for example) really quickly. Enter your Campaign Name as “London”, then within the editor you can edit what you need to tailor this new page  to visitors from London. Depending on how technical you are, you may need a little help with “macros” and “parameters” (I needed some help on that, not being too technically minded, but it’s easy to change the text and tailor it for your needs).
After saving, you can pick up the new campaign-specific url (which will look something like this: http://www.example.com/?refId=LNDN-81&data=london) and add it as the destination url in your AdGroup.

Two things to remember

  1. Changing the destination url on your ads will force them to be re-submitted for approval, so it’s best to warn the guys at Google that the new ads are coming over.
  2. If you’ve got a site in multiple languages, you need to edit the page in each language individually (I needed some help on that too!)

Once you’re set up, of course monitor the performance, and with the DatingFactory tool you can continue editing these new pages to keep improving their performance.

Go one step further with Dynamic Keyword Insertion

If you want to go further and get someone’s search term to run through your ad text plus the text on your homepage, you can do so with some useful functionality from Google, and through the DatingFactory’s admin system.
The first step is using Google’s “dynamic keyword insertion” tool (catchy title, eh?). If your AdGroups are tightly themed (they are, right?), this little trick tailors your ad on the fly to match the search term someone has punched in. In your ad, enter {KeyWord:Default Text}.
Explained simply, this tells your ad to display the search term that was entered. If the search term is over 25 characters, it displays the default text (eg “Online Dating”) instead. There are some rules about how and where to do this, so read up on it here:
http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=74996
OK. Now take the following code “&kw={keyword:nil}” and add it to your destination url, leaving you with something like this:
http://www.example.com/?refId=LNDN-81&data=london&kw={keyword:nil}
Make this the destination url for the AdGroup you’re working on. Once again, your ads will be automatically re-submitted for Google’s approval.
Next add “kw” in the Get Parameter box at the bottom of your DatingFactory page editor, and click on “Insert into HTML”. What you will see at the end of your html is this “{%GetParameters_kw%}”. Finally, you can now take that code and drop it wherever you want in your text to create a completely tailored visitor experience.
How will it look? Pretty good. If, for example, the text on your landing page reads something like:
“When you’re looking for {%GetParameters_kw%}…”
When the visitor searched on “London dating sites”, they saw and clicked on a relevant ad, and read on your landing page:
“When you’re  looking for London dating sites…”
Give it a go and experiment to see what works best for you. With these two tips, and with careful monitoring of the results, you should see an improvement in your site’s performance over time. And it’s those incremental improvements that make all the difference in the long term.
For more information on the keyword insertion capability, contact your DatingFactory Account Manager, and they’ll be happy to help you out.