Do You Have Dedicated Landing Pages for Your PPC?

Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising is now one of the fastest growing forms of advertising. Most of you will be familar with Google AdWords – you bid on particular keywords, create adverts relating to those keywords, set a maximum amount you want to pay for each click on that ad for that keyword – and bingo! Lots of high quality traffic heading your way (as long as you’re bidding on the right terms and have a budget that allows for more than one click a day!).

PPC advertising, especially Google AdWords are a fantastic way of increasing the volume of traffic to your site. Many types of websites and businesses will benefit from PPC:

• If you have a new site which is not yet ranking well in the search engines
• If you’re in a very competitive market and don’t really stand a chance for ranking on your key terms
• If you haven’t got any optimisation on your site, so probably won’t rank for your desired terms

PPC is a great way of getting traffic to your site, but that’s only half the battle. Once someone clicks on your advert and lands on your website, what happens then? You need to carefully think about what your goal is for that visitor:

• Signing up for your newsletter
• Making a purchase
• Registering for an event
• Making contact via your ‘Contact Us’ form

Once you know what your goal is, you then have to think about how you’ll achieve that goal. This is where landing pages come in. A landing page, simply put, is the page that visitors ‘land’ on when they first enter your site. With PPC you have control over this (whereas in natural search it’s most likely to be your homepage, however other pages will rank also, but unless you’ve optimised a particular page for a specific phrase, it’s unlikely you’ll have much control over this).

Anyway, back to PPC where you can specify the landing page you want your visitors to land on. So what is the best page on your site to direct them to? You may think that your homepage is the best page – let the visitor click about and go to the content they want to see. But that’s where you’re wrong. The Internet has made us all lazy, demanding and impatient! We don’t want to have to search your site for the information we’re looking for – we want it presented to us straight away!

For example, if you’re selling bikes and have an advert running for the keyphrase ‘Ladies red bike’, when a searcher enters that term into the search box, they’ll get a list of natural and paid results. If they click on your advert…

Ladies Red Bike
Wide Range Of Bikes For
Ladies Who Like To Ride
www.yoursite.com

…where will they land? Do they land on your page featuring all your ladies red bikes, or do they land on your homepage? What makes more sense to you? If they can’t see immediately what they’re looking for, they’ll hit that dreaded ‘back’ button and click on another advert, and you’ve just been charged for a click with no result.

So it’s important that you direct people to landing pages that are relative to their search query.

Come back on Monday to find out what our top tips are for creating landing pages with conversions in mind; getting people to take the action you want. The more conversions you get, the better return on investment you’ll get from your PPC campaign.

In the meantime, if you’ve had any success using landing pages in your PPC campaign, leave a note in the comments telling us abou it! And remember, SMEketing are dab hands at creating high quality landing pages. If you’d like us to overhaul your PPC campaign and help you get more conversions, get in touch with us on 023 8083 7271 or email us on info@SMEketing.com.

1 Comment March 4, 2010