In PPC advertising success is about being targeted AND unique. As one or more products in a particular affiliate niche start to outperform other similar products, everyone jumps on the hot ticket items to try and make their buck. This makes the niche highly competitive and therefore more difficult to stand out in.

In such a scenario looking and sounding different than your competitor’s in the sponsored SERP (Search Engine Ranking Page) results becomes ultra-critical to your PPC campaign success.

You should ask yourself questions like, Does my landing page look like everyone else’s?  Does my content represent only a rephrased version of other top affiliates? How can I stand out from the rest?

To get started you can do some intel on what other affiliates are doing and then try to define your own style from there. Search using Google and click on some of the top ranking ads. Have a pen and paper ready to take notes on design patterns and copy trends you come across. But don’t copy. Try to innovate as much as possible while sticking within the parameters of what has proven to work well in that niche. In a word: REFINE.

Your notes on keywords, matching strategies, ad text, promotion strategy and more will how you design your own marketing collateral and ultimately affect whether or not a particular landing page or ad is highly relevant to a user and therefore successful or unsuccessful in your campaign.

There’s strong evidence to suggest that searchers often click on one ad, don’t like what they see and bounce or click ‘back’, only to click on another ad in the sponsored results.

When your ad is the second or third ad they click, ask yourself whether they’re seeing exactly the same graphics and overall text that didn’t interest them the last two times. Is it possible that they assume your ad is the one they just clicked on because it looks almost identical? Simple mistakes like these could sabotage successful campaign strategy, kill your conversions and quickly eat up your allotted ad budget as the number of bounces on your landing pages goes up.

So what can you do?  What if your landing page performs decently, but is very similar to all the other landing pages in the SERPs?

Over time, as Google begins to do more and more human landing page review, your Quality Score will eventually suffer the dreaded slap. So as the old adage goes, there’s no time like the present to plan ahead by designing a new landing page, featuring a similar theme that’s working, and A/B split test it.

If you’re promoting RegCure for instance, and you are seeing success with a “performance” theme, why not try designing new graphics and copy that pictures this theme in a different way.  If you give it some thought and research into stock imagery sites like iStockPhoto.com using your top keywords, you may be pleasantly surprised at the fresh ideas that come about.

As always, try to think like a searcher and visualize how your whole experience flows from search to click to conversion or download.  There’s never been a better time than now to look, sound, and be different and unique.