I’ve gotten a few emails asking me, “Why not use a name squeeze page at this point in the process? Then your list will grow bigger, faster, and then after they sign up for your list, you send them to the review…”

Up until about 10 days ago, that is the exact process I had been using. For those of you unfamiliar with name squeeze pages, it would work pretty much like this:

  • Someone clicks on your PPC ad
  • They are taken to a page that contains only a newsletter/autoresponder signup form
  • After they opt-in to your autoresponder, they are then forwarded to your review page or the product sales letter

This method does have the distinct advantage that it helps build your opt-in list for this niche much faster than what I’ve laid out in my last few posts. However, with recent changes with Google Adwords, I cannot recommend it any longer.

You see, Google has recently changed their Adwords “quality” algorithm to take a look at the page you are sending your PPC traffic to, and to charge you outrageous prices for traffic if your landing page does not meet their so-called quality standards.

This means that things like squeeze pages (with no actual content related to the keyword you’re advertising with) are seen by Adwords to be extremely low quality, and thus Google has decided that you must pay through the nose to get traffic for that keyword.

Portalfeeder member “Steve H” came up with a perfect analogy for this:

Imagine if you wanted to advertise your car for sale in the newspaper, and the newspaper guy said he wanted to come round and check out the vehicle, and if it was a bit crappy he would charge you more for the advertisement. Purely to improve the newspaper reader’s experience, of course.

Can you imagine that? Just because your car is not very “high quality”, the newspaper wants to charge you TEN TIMES more for your ad than for other classified ads? Yet this is exactly what Google is doing with Adwords.

Because of this change, I cannot recommend using a name squeeze page as your landing page, at least when using Adwords. Since the other PPC systems don’t do this, you may want to use two different landing pages:

  • A landing page as I described in the last post for your Adwords traffic, and
  • A name squeeze page that redirects to your full review for all your other PPC traffic

Running and tracking two different landing pages is a bit more work, but the list-building power of the name squeeze page is something that cannot be denied. Later on, we’ll need that opt-in list when we take our business beyond affiliate marketing, and having a squeeze page in place for at least some of our PPC traffic will help quite a bit.

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