August 13, 2007 Comments
The thing about fundamentals is that we need to remind people of them over and over again. When it comes to paid search advertising, "use landing pages" is about as fundamental as it gets. Still, many small businesses (and large ones too!) forget this basic requirement of a good paid search advertising campaign. Pole Position Marketing's Diana Adams reminds readers of this today at the E-Marketing Performance blog.
She writes:
Your landing page is probably the most important element in your entire PPC campaign. You can write excellent ads, relevant to all the perfectly matched keywords in your list. You can have an amazing CTR because your ad text is flawlessly in line with your keywords. But if they can't quickly find what they came for, if you make your potential customer work harder than clicking a button to order your product or submit their query... they're going to leave. Ensure your users have a smooth landing when they get to your site. Make it easy for them to convert!
I covered about this concept more than two years ago in the article "The Simple Pay Per Click Change That Could Earn You More." In it, I wrote:
I understand that many business owners want to force their users to look at all of their products in the hopes that they will be able to upsell or cross sell their buyers. This is why the milk and bread is in the very back of the grocery store. That makes sense for a retail chain, but remember this; on the web, your biggest competitor is a single click away. You simply cannot play the same games with your customers that you can in a retail outlet. If you force your customer to play hide and seek, they will most likely seek out someone that makes it easier for them.
Don't make your customers work to buy from you. Give them what they want from the moment they enter your site. If you're not already targeting specific landing pages with your pay-per-click campaign, take the time to sit down and point those ads to someplace other than your front page. You might be surprised at the size of next month's profits.
Still, I see campaigns almost every day that dump every last visitor onto the home page of a web site.
It's also worth pointing out that with search engines now considering relevancy factors of landing pages in their calculation of where to rank your ad and how much to charge you, landing pages are now more important than ever. If you aren't already using landing pages in your paid search campaigns, you need to get cracking. Otherwise, you're throwing money down the drain each and every day.
Remember, you don't need to spend the time creating unique landing pages for every single campaign. Even if you simply point users toward the single most relevant existing page on your web site, you're sure to see an increase in conversions and a drop in your average CPC.
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