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This week we are looking into Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising in more detail. Since online advertising is set to grow beyond TV advertising in the next five years, there are a lot of companies out there that are going to start exploring whether they should be using PPC.

This is great news for Google shareholders and one of the reasons Microsoft fought so hard in their attempts to buy Yahoo. Their revenues will continue to grow as they jostle for supremacy in the PPC market. It also means that there will be a growth in the number of competitors for advertisers, so differentiating themselves and running better, more effective campaigns that work within their budgets is going to be high on their agendas.

The same rules of supply and demand apply to PPC, so it is a fair bet that as more companies consider moving greater portions of their budgets to online advertising, the higher the bid costs for competitive PPC markets will be.

With that in mind, we thought that it would be useful to start our PPC week by covering the most important facet of PPC. A facet that in our opinion is also the most overlooked; the landing page.

Firstly, in order to avoid confusion; the landing page is the page your visitor arrives on after clicking through via one of your adverts. The landing page is your shop window, as soon as your visitor clicks through it is no longer about just PPC, it is all about marketing and converting your visitors.

As a digital marketing agency, our role is to advise and assist our clients by identifying the right technology that we think will help them to exceed their marketing goals. When we talk to clients, we make this point more than once because in our mind Internet Marketing is a vehicle. It is a vehicle to deliver you more sales and more leads. In this analogy, PPC is the vehicle that is delivering the potential for more sales and leads.

If you take the “Internet” away from “Internet Marketing”, you’re left with just marketing. The same rules of marketing apply on the Internet as they did in the very early nineties pre Internet. The vehicle may be slightly different and the presentation may be more virtual, however the pride you would take in how your office might look to potential visitors should be the same as if the same visitors come to your web site. Perhaps more so if you read the hype about the average web user taking 5 seconds to make up their mind about whether a page or site is of interest to them before going elsewhere.

Hopefully the reason why your landing page is so important is now obvious. If not, let’s look at it another way. You spend a huge amount of time creating your online advert, you spend time researching your keyphrases and the content to attract qualified visitors, you set the campaign up and….. wait, where do you send your visitors. Your home page? Wrong answer, but a lot of people do this. Your contact page? No, but again a popular answer. Our rule is simple with this one, if you are spending money to attract visitors, make them think as little as possible. This means, make the landing page as simple and as clear as possible and relevant to the traffic.

Often what happens is companies create a hastily put together landing page. And because of this, all of their hard work and budget is very likely to be wasted. The number one take away from this article should be that the landing page is the most important part of a PPC campaign.

So now that we have covered some of the theory, let’s look at what we can be doing in order to create the perfect landing page.

Process for Creating Landing Pages that Convert

• Identify your objective for your campaign. Are you trying to sell something, capture their details, encourage them to click through to another page? Whatever it is, take the time to fully understand what your marketing objectives are and then plan agree on what will make the campaign a success. Only by agreeing success metrics can you measure how good or bad a campaign was.
• Do your keyword research. There are plenty of tools available that will help you and often the PPC engine provides help in this area. The keywords should be the words that your potential customers are using to search for your products or services. We’ll cover how to create keyword groups in more detail later in the week.
• Have one action per page if possible. Try not to give your visitors too much choice. This is about having a good campaign objective, if your goal is to grow your list then your page should have one action only, encouraging them to sign up.

• Make sure that your landing page includes the search phrase for which you are targeting. If you include the phrase that your customer used as the page header/title, they are likely to stay on your page for longer.
• Rightly or wrongly, we all lack patience and we all seem to have lost the ability to read an entire page of text. Consider this when creating your landing pages and cater for your audience who might not have the time or the inclination to read everything. The general marketing here is “am I appealing to my audience”.
• Carry out the “So what” test on your landing page. This is when you say “so what” to the points you make. This is a process that is designed to make you think about how you differentiate yourself and become more relevant to your visitors by highlighting the benefits and what is in it for them.
• Check the page a number of times before going live. Is it clear? Does it describe clearly what you want your visitor to do? Has it passed the “so what” test? Does it provide enough benefits to encourage your visitor to complete your desired action?
• Deliver what your adverts say. If you’re offering a solution to a problem, provide this information. This is about making your landing page as specific as possible, don’t make your visitors go looking for this information, this is why they clicked on your ad in the first place.
• Take pride in your landing pages, these are important sales tools. If you’re selling third party products, take the time to rewrite the sales copy. Make your page different to everyone else and differentiate yourselves.
• Ensure that your landing page has the ability to capture the details of your visitors. If they have clicked your advert, they are interested in the topic, take advantage of this by offering them something in return for them giving you their details. Next time you have something interesting to say, you can email market them, which is much cheaper than PPC.
• The benefits of marketing on the Internet is that you have access to the results in an instant. Don’t waste this information, use the analytic and improve your landing pages. If your bounce rate is high, then you need to improve your message. Read through this page again and you will improve this. Try different products, different actions, lay the page out differently. Test, rinse, repeat.

We’re keen to hear your feedback, do not hesitate to use the comments option below.