When operating a pay per click campaign, it is vital to capture the browser’s attention and then maintain that connection all the way through to the desired action. In previous articles on AdWords optimisation, we’ve discussed making the most of even the smallest techniques to achieve this but today we’re looking at an obvious and important part of the conversion chain. This ridiculously obvious but oft-overlooked technique is the utilisation of appropriate landing pages.
It will be a different article we devote to detailing what makes a ‘quality’ landing page and perhaps another for discussing what makes a landing page good for conversions. In this article, we will mainly be looking at appropriate landing page selection. It is very straight forward. But we often see campaigns that simply neglect to use them at all.
Is Your Campaign Failing At Life?
If you have a campaign with multiple ad groups but are only making use of a single landing page (or even just your home page) you are failing at AdWords. Even if you want to advertise a special offer across all your ad groups, you should still have multiple landing pages. They may repeat the special offer, but the rest of the content should be tailored to the keywords contained within each ad group. And because of this, the creation of landing pages can become an ongoing task as you study your search term reports and find new sets of keywords to target in your campaign.
So Which One Is Appropriate?
Let us assume you have structured your campaign correctly. You have keywords divided up thematically with matching ad copy. The browser types in a keyword, sees an ad with bold text (where your copy matches their search query) and clicks. For example, let us imagine the browser typed in “designer handbags” and they click your ad. However, you have directed them to the home page of your website. Maybe you like the look of it, the special offers you have scrolling across the jquery slider, or you want them browsing all your product categories. The problem is, you have interrupted their thought process. You have pained them. The web is dominated by instant-gratification junkies these days and you just made them stop and think. Sure, they will be able to use the navigation to find the right product category, but you have annoyed them a little, some to the point where they have left your website without bothering. The herd moves as fast as its slowest members.
It is vital to make the destination URL of your ads the most relevant page on your website. You can’t really take this too far. If they type in “team building activities brisbane”, then the H1 of your landing page should be the same, and the copy and images be relevant and targeted to the needs indicated by the keyword. If they type in “corporate team building”, it should be a different landing page. You should even go so far as to trying to understand the psychology behind the use of certain terms and tailor your offerings and calls to action to suit. If it requires the construction of additional pages on your website, then do so. It’s worth it.
Not only will you reduce your bounce rate and increase the conversion rate of your traffic, but you will also increase the Quality Score of your campaign, which will, in turn, decrease your cost per click.
Example Time:
We will split this up into the different parts of the relevancy chain (keyword – ad copy – landing page).
Keywords
These are the keywords in our ad group. We’re using the location targeting in settings (Brisbane, Australia) instead of keyword location targeting. Notice how they are tightly themed (and broad-match modified) so we don’t risk displaying a less than relevant ad to the browser.
Ad Copy
And here is our ad copy. We’re split-testing special offers but you can see how the ad copy is keyword heavy and as relevant as possible.
Landing Page
And here is the landing page we are making use of on the client’s website:
http://photoboothsaustralia.com.au/photobooth-hire-brisbane.html
Another ad group in the same campaign is devoted to people wanting to purchase photobooths. It’s pretty obvious how important it is to show those people a different, more appropriate landing page.
There you have it.
If you don’t want to waste money, use highly relevant landing pages! Just remember, keyword + ad copy + landing page.