Pay Per Click Landing Pages

Probably the best pay per click landing page analogy I have heard was that a website is like a Sears store. You can go in the through the main entrance, which is like landing on a website’s home page. There are many irrelevant departments right in front, so you will have to walk a bit to get to the department you want. But what happens if you want to just go into the hardware department? Well at Sears there is a side door for the hardware store. You walk in and go directly to the hardware department and are out the door with minimal effort. This is exactly the same concept as a PPC landing page, where you know exactly what the searcher is searching for. So why would you send them to the front entrance, if you know they want to go to the side entrance and go to the hardware department?

With PPC landing pages you want to send the searcher to the most relevant page as possible (side entrance). In a perfect world you would have a custom landing page for each keyword in your account. Since this is not very practical you should start making custom PPC landing pages for your most profitable keywords. So what makes a good landing page?

Landing Page Best Practices:

• make it clean (you have just seconds to sell the visitor)
• headline should contain your most profitable keywords
• bullet points can help to highlight key benefits
• images should not distract visitor from your benefits eg. the guy above
• lead forms should be as minimal as possible
• have a clear call to action
• don’t forget a prominent for submission button

I recommend trying out variations of each landing page element through A/B testing. This is made very easy with PPC because you can have two of the same ad copies in an adgroup with different destination URLs. Make sure that you have at least 100 clicks per landing page before making any judgments. But if you want to be sure which landing page is statistically the winner you can use this A/B tester calculator.

Test test test…