by samLanding pages may be an under-considered aspect of PPC advertising and SEO. In terms of PPC specifically, marketers may plough the majority of their energies into optimising the ads themselves. As important as the ads are, driving relevant traffic to your website is only half of the battle. To be successful, providers of Internet marketing must lead potential customers to consistent and relevant landing pages, as it is here that conversions are made, not the search engines.
It is for this reason that it is possible that converting a higher percentage of existing traffic can result in a higher return on investment than simply attempting to drive larger levels of traffic. If your percentage of conversions is low, the fault is more likely to be with the website’s content than the ad. If your PPC ads are optimised effectively and make use of the targeting features available, all traffic should be highly relevant and interesting. There is always room to increase visitor follow-through once they reach the website, and a competent and goal-directed landing page is a guaranteed step in the right direction.
One of the most important elements of a PPC landing page is the extent to which it is an accurate representation of the offer that attracted the visitor. The advertising agency will do well to reiterate the ‘pull’, ensuring that the users know the company can come through on its offer. Make it immediately clear where the visitor has landed by featuring the offer/promised content clearly on arrival. Even if an offer is featured on a homepage, it isn’t a particularly good idea to use the homepage as a landing page. Most homepages function as miniature hubs of information. Each different section is a potential competitor for the user’s attention. This is counterproductive; if your ad has successfully driven a qualified customer to your website, make sure there are no barriers to the content that sparked their interest. This also includes staying away from pop-up requests and self-initiating content.
Your landing page will be doing a great disservice to your PPC ads if it doesn’t feature a clear call to action. The mere presence of a user on a service’s landing page is indicative of an interest or intention to buy. It is never wise to make prospective customers look for a means of following through on their clicks; this only delays a purchase and potentially aggravates or confuses the user.
As successful as a PPC ad and landing page may be, there is always room for improvement. Creative advertising agencies constantly monitor the performance of their PPC campaigns, weeding out the ineffective ads and capitalising on the successful elements. Landing page maintenance and enhancement should be approached similarly. Marketers will do well to occasionally test varying landing page strategies. Google’s Campaign Experiments enable marketers to test different landing pages with controllable (and thus, minimal) losses. A focus on optimising PPC ad landing pages enables marketers to continually develop their PPC strategies as a whole.