Search Marketing Blog
Paid Search Landing Page Tips
Pay-per-click (PPC) search campaigns are the most targeted and measurable form of advertising available today. In order to get the most out of your PPC campaigns, we recommend creating and implementing unique Paid Search landing pages. A Landing Page is the specific arrival page on your Web site that is presented to visitors arriving through Paid Search campaigns. Customized enhancements to the pages that greet your Paid Search visitors can dramatically improve your online customer acquisition efforts. The following tips will help you improve conversion rates, and turn more qualified visitors into satisfied customers.
Less is More
When designing a Paid Search landing page, be sure not to distract qualified visitors with too many options. The objective is to have your visitors immediately be presented with a compelling call-to-action. Keep your design clean and usable. Also, limit the number of navigation choices presented to visitors on each landing page. In other words, don’t confuse your visitors with multiple call-to-actions or offerings. Keep it simple.
Provide Concise Copy
Online visitors have a short attention span, and tend to “scan” content. Therefore, it’s best to keep your copy clear and to-the-point. Break the landing page content into useful chunks of text, so that it is easy to absorb and rapidly understood. The last thing you want to do is make it difficult for a qualified visitor to grasp your call-to-action message.
Compelling Call-To-Action
The easiest way to hurt your conversion rates is to force your Paid Search visitors think! Thus, the best strategy is to develop precise and enticing call-to-action. It also makes sense to include incentives for choosing to take an immediate action (such as filling-out a form, signing-up for a subscription, or purchasing a product). These incentives can include discounts, promotional offers, and value added services. In addition, present product checkout form, or lead generation form, directly on the page (i.e, don’t make your visitors search for your action item). It can be beneficial to conduct usability testing on your checkout process to ensure that it is as intuitive and user-friendly as possible.
Quality Score Matters
Due to changes in the ranking criteria of the major Paid Search advertising platforms, it is no longer possible to “bid your way to the top”. In early 2006, Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft Live Search (formerly MSN) have incorporated PPC landing page quality scoring, which takes into account relevancy and functionality. Paid Search landing pages need to be relevant to each of your ad groups, and if possible, each of your keywords. It is also important to utilize your targeted keywords and relevant information in the page headers and copy.
Design for Results
The purpose of Paid Search landing pages is to increase the number of visitors, sent through Paid Search campaigns that convert to a desired action on your site. Motivating content and images that search engine users discover when they arrive at your site are the keys to converting visitors to results.
Let us know if you have any other tips or recommendations for improving Paid Search conversion rates.
Tom Hale 12.04.2007 at 9:06 pm
I hear you, can’t argue with the concept. Although the practicality of “unique” sometimes can be an issue, depending on the project, resources etc. Unique to each search term for instance? That can eat up some resources.
But I can’t help but paraphrase in my mind when I hear talk about “unique” landing pages.
Here it goes, “Since you are paying for this traffic, let’s make a good web page to land on, rather than use one of the the crappy pages already on your site”.
-T
Kent Schnepp 12.04.2007 at 10:04 pm
Great point Tom. I think that each of the tips above should be applied to all pages of a Web site. However, paid search specific landing pages can allow greater flexibility when conducting multivariate and conversion testing. In addition, any changes made to the pages will not negatively affect organic rankings as we often disallow the search engines from indexing the pages via a robots.txt file.