ashleybaker

Hi,
I've not propperly venured into an ad campaign on adwords or whatever before. Say I'm set up as an affiliate for a phone company, and can make £x amount if i make a sale with them. What is better --

Send them straight through my affiliate link to the phone company's website
Make a landing page persuading them to go through to the phone company's site?

Cheers
Ash

aff_tim

Test them both out and see what converts at a higher rate for your offer.

Using a landing page gives you a lot of options for pre-selling as well as for collecting information for up-selling. You also have a lot of control over your QS with a landing page so you'll be paying less per click on Google. A landing page also gives you a site which can get indexed by the engines.

Direct to merchant is easier and faster.

Dodgerbob

Straight to merchant has always been solid for me. Plus, I feel like I can scale a lot faster. Then spend a lot more time in a spreadsheet optimizing.

But like aff_tim said, testing is the key. If you've got the skills to build out the landing pages, you've got lots of options.

ubaidabcd

Depends on the quality of your landing page. The purpose of your "landing page" is to pre-sell. If you can accomplish that, then the customer is ready to make their purchase when they get to the merchant. If you send them directly to the merchant, they're relying on the merchant to sell the offer to them.

mckay

Good tips, man.

But I thought that you can't send the leads straight to the merchant in Google, am I wrong?

mckay

turbolapp

I think I know what you mean. Google doesn't like a saturation of ads with all the same keywords pointing to the same destination url. Because it offers google searchers a' less than optimal 'experience or something like that. With a landing page you have the ability to direct them to your own url and then to the merchant site. This supposedly creates a more "desirable "experience for the user. You may be able to get away with a direct link to the merchant if you have less used (or perhaps 'more creative'?) keywords. But then you have the catch 22 of no one seeing them.

Again, I'm not positive there would be a problem with direct links since I use landing pages, this is just what I understand to be true.

__________________
Workflowy Best Free Organizational App. Period.

ubaidabcd

I think they're referring to how with Google your display link and destination url have to be the same. So your affiliate link in the destination url, has to be the same link in your ad or your ad will be declined. Although you can probably get a short url, or domain redirect.

I don't think Google would care about direct linking, how would they know if it's your own site or not. You wouldn't get a landing page created for your own site.

Affiliate-Ninja

I think Google limits the amount of affiliates that can directly link to the site. So you may have to pay more per click, or have a fantastically good converting ad to be listed. But try both, and track the results.