Locking In on Keywords - Tools of the Trade
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To date, most companies purchasing keywords have to settle with dropping a potential customer off at the home page. In some cases, they can send them to a category level page or to a particular product page. Going beyond this to a more customized landing page that better matches the keyword is simply too taxing in terms of time, people, and money. Simply getting the requisite page changes through IT is often a sufficient barrier in and of itself.
But solutions exist for these problems. Services like Offermatica (http://www.offermatica.com) from Fort Point and Optimost (http://www.optimost.com) offer tools that allow marketers and merchants to cost-effectively manipulate a page to reflect any number of necessary variants. Now a home page can show language and featured products that clearly tie to the keyword that brought a potential customer to the site. Even product level pages can be improved, be it through highlighting particularly relevant product features, adjusting pricing and promotion, or showing related products - all of which tie back to the source keyword.
In the case of Offermatica, the tool works as a hosted application. Portions of a page are defined as "mBoxes" that are then filled based on the keyword source. The content can be anything you would normally put on a Web page: text, images, links, forms, etc. Because it is a hosted application, it bypasses the need for internal IT while providing the responsiveness needed to keep up with rapidly changing marketing requirements. And best of all, both Offermatica and Optimist are priced as a service, eliminating both difficulty and cost as an excuse for doing nothing.
Keywords - at least the ones that work - are not going to get any cheaper. They will remain a valuable tool for driving qualified traffic. But increasingly buying the right ones will only be the first step. Generating a return on the resulting traffic through landing page optimization will be the key continuing to generate positive returns.
Rob Schmults is an independent consultant who has worked in the Internet and e-commerce space since 1994.
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