You’ve taken the time to research keywords, set up your bids, create your headlines and ads, and then you put your homepage as the url to send all of those clicks to. Oh, and by the way, you’re selling the most incredible couches ever made, they come in 2 sizes, leather or fabric and if you choose fabric, 4 different patterns, if you choose leather, 4 different colors and that you’re offering free shipping and oh yes, your homepage mentions nothing about this but it does have cool flash. Guess what? You might as well throw your money out the window since it’s being spent about that effectively by sending all of your traffic to your homepage.
I think you can see where this is going; you should use a landing page or pages to help turn those clicks to purchases. The idea is simple, if the visitor initially searched for brown leather couches and you had the top result and he clicked on it and landed on your homepage that:
- had no mention of the term brown leather couches on it
- had a cool flash presentation about what a great company you are.
What do you think the visitor is going to do? Studies show he’s probably going to hit his back button and go to the next result.
So what is the right way to address this? Send the visitor to a page that has what he’s looking for. He told you up front he’s looking for brown leather couches so put him on a page that:
- has the phrase “brown leather couches” somewhere in a prominent position on the page
- Show him pictures of your brown leather couches
- Let him know it comes in other colors and in fabric as well
- Show him a price
- Give him the opportunity to purchase it
- Let him know that free shipping is available
Now what do you think the visitor is going to do? Probably pull out his credit card and buy that great brown couch you have for sale.
Landing pages don’t need to be stand alone pages created specifically for the campaign (although you should use that approach if your current site doesn’t have pages that can support your keywords), they can be an existing page within your site but they need to properly address the needs of your ppc campaign.
Spend your money wisely and support that spend by being smart throughout the ppc process and that includes where you send your visitors.
