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.
>>Source Link
>>Blog: Search Engine Guide : Small Business Search Marketing
>>Publish Date: 8/14/2007 7:02:31 AM
>>Keywords: your landing
Related Posts
>>SEW Experts: Do You Really Need to Overhaul Your Landing Pages? #
In today"s Search Ads column, "Do You Really Need to Overhaul Your Landing Pages?," Tony Wright tells you how to determine whether or not it"s really necessary to spend the summer doldrums tweaking la
>>A Rebuttal to Neil Patel"s Social Media Landing Page Article #
While I"ve always found Neil Patel"s insight into the Social Media landscape to be pretty insightful, I think his latest Search Engine Land article about social media landing pages completely misses t
>>Seven Steps to a Better Landing Page #
When it comes to search marketing campaigns, your landing page is one of the single most important factors in whether a site visitor converts to a customer or not. A good landing page can increase you
>>How Much Would You Pay to Get Visitors to Leave Your Site? #
Would you pay somebody to leave your site? No? Think again, because you may be doing it right now, and it"s probably costing you more than you think. How"s that, you ask? If you"re paying for marke
>>Improving Your Google Quality Score #
Back in the early days of paid search advertising, traditional marketers celebrated the fact that they could finally buy placement on search engine results pages for a flat price. Traditional search e
>>Know Where Your Ad Spend is Going – Know Your Clicks #
PPC Assurance gathers data telling you when and how visitors arrive at a landing page or website from any given ad in a PPC campaign. Offering a granular examination of all paid-click referral traffic
>>Podcast with Brett Crosby and Avinash Kaushik #
After a bit of a layoff, I had the pleasure of doing a podcast together with Google Analytics"s dynamic duo of Brett Crosby and Avinash Kaushik. Brett handles the marketing of Google Analytics, and A
>>Announcing SEOmoz"s Landing Page Competition #
Posted by randfishLast week, Roberta Rosenberg at Copyblogger authored a piece that offered some terrific advice for SEOmoz"s premium membership landing page. We wrote about that entry and mentioned t
>>Advice on Landing Pages from the Experts, More Details on the SEOmoz Contest & Our First Landing Page Submission #
Posted by randfishYesterday"s announcement of the SEOmoz premium landing page contest created an exceptional buzz - we"ve already had more than a dozen people contact us about creating their version o
>>Implications of Google"s New Bid Calculations #
Maybe I am having an off week, but Google"s announced changes to the PPC cost calculations seem a little like a magic show and the expected audience is novice search advertisers. Their FAQ about the