The Landing Page: Don't Let The Wrong Landing Pages Destroy Your PPC Campaign.

You can generate as many clicks as possible but unless a good proportion of these convert to sales then much of the benefit of the clicks has been wasted. You maximise the conversion of a click to a sale by the correct use of landing pages.

Many of the landing pages for PPC (eg for Google Adwords) that I have seen send the person who clicked on the ad to the home page of the website. Often and especially in the case of a product being offered for sale the home page is just not targeted enough to meet the needs of the searcher and this inevitably results in poor conversion of clicks to sales and thus on the ROI of the campaign.

When a searcher enters a search term into the search box the actual term is a very good indication of what the searcher wants (referred to as MOTIVATION). A very good example would be a searcher entering "Canon Camera ABC234" . If the advertiser sold a range of Canon Cameras it would be quite wrong to send the searcher to a general page about Canon Cameras. It would be important to send the searcher to a page that is undoubtedly about the model "Canon Camera ABC234". In essence the searcher has told you EXACTLY what is wanted. It is then incumbent upon the provider to satisfy this MOTIVATION. A failure to do so will more often than not lead to abandonment of the site clicked through to.

Of course the implication of this approach is that for a successful PPC campaign  more than a single landing page is required.

How to Construct a Landing Page

There are 5 very important considerations to take into account when designing and constructing a good landing page. The probability of making a conversion is directly proportional to how the following 5 factors are managed.

1. The most important of these is to address directly and unambiguously the MOTIVATION of the searcher as described above.

2. The second most important landing page success factor is to display exactly what the VALUE of your selling proposition is (ie what makes you and your product different from competing products and why your company is the best one to buy from). Use text, images, headlines, colours, etc to highlight this. Be consistent throughout the site.

3. You need to remove any annoyances or difficulties to get to the desired action on the landing page. This is referred to as FRICTION. For example making people log in to make a purchase is FRICTION, longer than necessary forms to complete is FRICTION.

4. Fourth on the list is the need to provide an INCENTIVE to the landing page visitor and this is all the more important if there is FRICTION on the landing page. As a general rule the lower the FRICTION the less is the need for an INCENTIVE.

5. The fifth consideration is ANXIETY and we've all experienced this. It certainly raises its ugly head at the time of adding credit card details into a shopping cart. It's important to remove as much ANXIETY as possible by offering plain to see guarantees, an easy to understand return policy, testimonials, 3rd party endorsements and the like. The higher the value of a product being sold the greater is the level of ANXIETY.