The All-Important Landing Page
If you ask me, and some people do, the two most important aspects of a successful PPC campaign are the Ad Copy and the Landing Page. As you can see from the title, I’m mainly interested in talking about Landing Pages; however, I have to tip my hat to well written Ad Copy because without it the customer won’t even make it as far as your site. I’m not downplaying how important that is, but that’s as far as the Ad Copy will take you. After the searcher decides he/she is going to click on your ad, the fate of the conversion lies in the hands of the Landing Page.
Google has very specific standards in place with regard to Landing Pages and I’m not going to repeat them. You can find that information here: Adwords Learning Center. If you fail to adhere to Google’s Link Policy you’ll suffer either disapproved ads or a Minimum CPC so high it’ll make you laugh. I recommend you adhere to it.
I also want to point out that you can spend A LOT of time on your landing page. You can experiment with every single aspect of it, test multiple combinations, chart the results and ultimately you’ll be left with the optimal result. In fact, I recommend you do that; but if you don’t have the time or energy to take on such a challenge, here are a few quick tips to get the most out of those clicks:
-Always take the searcher directly to the page most relevant to the keyword that was searched. This one is pretty obvious but I see this mistake made on a regular basis. Not only with this improve your Quality Score, it will ensure that your customer views the product you’re offering and greatly increases the odds of a conversion.
-Make sure your page loads in a timely manner. Yeah, Flash is cool, but if its going to take 5 minutes for me to see what your website has to offer, chances are I’m going to tap that back button before it loads and you’re still going to pay for a click. Save the fancy stuff for the homepage and take your customer directly to a simple, informative product page.
-If you offer any kind of deals, make sure everyone knows it. Do you provide free shipping on orders over $50? Do you offer first time customers a 15% discount? Does anybody know? Not only should this information be plainly displayed in your Ad Copy, it should be clearly visible on the Landing Page. Again, if the searcher doesn’t see the offer he/she was expecting, they’re going to bail.
-Be Competitive! Internet shoppers are shoppers none the less. If you’re competitors are all offering their services for a lower price, your customers are going to notice. It’s fairly easy to “shop around” online, the next product is only a click or two away.
-Simplicity. Don’t overwhelm your customers. Don’t flash neon colors into their eyes. Don’t make them navigate through a maze of offers and unnecessary steps. Give them a photo, a price, a deal and a button they can click to buy. Throw anything else into the mix and you’re giving them a chance to change their mind or even forget why they navigated to your webpage in the first place.
Like I stated earlier, you can go much more in depth when it comes to Landing Page Optimization. There are limitless possibilities. Just remember not to overlook the simple things. I’ve seen a surprising number of sites out there that don’t consider the points I’ve listed above.
I’ll leave you with the one thought that crosses my mind every time I approach a new account that needs to jumpstart its search campaign: My mother is out there. She’s not internet savvy, she’s not impressed by graphics and she’s a very busy woman who’s been hunting for bargains her whole life. If you can get her to buy your product online, you’re doing a fantastic job.
May 31st, 2007 at 9:41 am
Christian,
Great Article, I whole heartedly agree with all that you have said regarding landing pages. In our line of work it is easy to see a bad landing page because we know what to look for (and believe me we have seen some bad ones) but it often times isnt that obvious to people. There is somthing to be said about your personal business landing page, of course you are looking at other landing pages but are you studying them? That is exactly why one should get Pepperjam to help them out, we look at this stuff all day long… and can gauge immediately if a landing page will be successful or what can be done to improve it
Best,
Dean
June 5th, 2007 at 9:05 pm
I have a question about this paragraph
“Google has very specific standards in place with regard to Landing Pages and I’m not going to repeat them. You can find that information here: Adwords Learning Center. If you fail to adhere to Google’s Link Policy you’ll suffer either disapproved ads or a Minimum CPC so high it’ll make you laugh. I recommend you adhere to it.”
I understand how not adhering to the link policy could lead to disapproved ad, but I am not sure how it might impact minimum bids. Do you mean because if you are linking to a different site your landing page score will be inaccurate?
June 6th, 2007 at 6:02 pm
aeiouy,
What happens in this situation is that Adwords will crawl your destination site to see if the content matches that of the ad text and the keyword structure of your account. If Google finds you are trying to link to a site that is completely unrelated to the keywords that you’ve bid on, they mostly likely will drop your quality score for those keywords and require you to pay significantly more per click to bid on those terms than a legitimate site would have to pay.
For instance, if you own a gambling site and you are bidding on terms like ‘investments’ or ‘insurance’ with the intent of targeting people with a certain level of disposable income, Google will see that your landing page will have little or nothing to do with either Investing or Insurance, and then will require you to pay at least $5, $10, or even more per click for those terms that they’ve deemed irrelevant to your site. But if your friend has a site devoted to selling Insurance and Investments, the landing page will instantly be recognized by Adwords as a valid site for those terms, and therefore may only require him to pay a minimum bid of $0.10 per click. This is, of course, Google’s relentless efforts of bringing the most relevant websites directly to it’s users.
Trevor