Bad Stumble - Good Stumble
I was using StumbleUpon tonight and I ran into an example of a great landing page and really bad landing page. Let’s take a look at them.
The Bad Stumble
This was the bad stumble. This "Made for Adsense" blog is sure to draw a quick thumbs down. The ‘article’ was a short snippet from an article farm, about 200 words of useless "work at home" tripe. Submitting this to StumbleUpon is certainly a "What were they thinking?" moment. While such a poor page might work for an arbitrage page, at least until Google shut down the attached Adsense account, it isn’t going to work with SU. (And no, I’m not providing the address of this site)
The important thing to remember is that stumblers navigate to new pages by clicking the ’stumble’ button, not by clicking ads like some search visitors will. If a stumbler clicks your ad, that means they’re probably very interested in the subject matter you presented or that the ad represents.
The Good Stumble
Frog Rate shows how to do it. A very clean page with a cute graphic, an interactive Javascript widget and well targeted advertising in a high paying niche. People will stick with the site and try out the calculator since it does the calculations directly on the page. Who can resist the pull of a cute frog and figuring out their mortgage payment. This puts them in the mood to click on a mortgage ad, perhaps to get some further information.
Notice how they used a small Adsense block. This insures that the two highest paying ads are the only ones shown for maximum revenue as well as best user experience. The only thing that might be done different is to use an affiliate offer. It would be interesting to figure out which does the best.
What do you think about these landing pages? Which do you think would make the most money over an average month? Leave me a comment and let me know what your thoughts are.
That first one is the worst thing these eyes have ever seen! You’re right about both of these, the second is spectacular.
Hi Court,
I really liked the second one since we’re in the market for a new house. Most of the loan rate calculator pages I’ve seen are crammed full of ads and popups. The ‘frog’ is clean and easy to work with.
Yeah the second one obviously is the winner and by a mile. First of all even if you forget about the ads in the first example, the template isn’t soothing to the eye at all, while the second one’s template is very appealing. And then ofcourse the ads…
Hi Ruchir,
I did cover up their logo which was a mix of yellow, gray and green since I didn’t want to give them any publicity.
The article text, which isn’t seen in the screen shot, was also the same shade of green as the Adsense ads. Where I’ve seen worse is where someone had a very similar MFA scheme except they made the keyword heavy text a pale gray where it was very difficult to read.
“Notice how they used a small Adsense block. This insures that the two highest paying ads are the only ones shown for maximum revenue…”
Did not know that. A great tip, thank you!
You’re welcome.
Quality over quantity is one of the debates about Adsense.
On a highly targeted and competitive niche page like Frog Rate having a single block insures that only the highest paying ads are displayed.
On less targeted pages like I have here, it works better to have the full compliment of 3 blocks to give visitors more choices.