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Pay-per-click advertising is a formidable tool for getting your business and products to appear in users’ search results. Firms spend thousands of pounds a month on running these campaigns – they’re that valuable for generating business.

That is, they’re that valuable if they’re effective.

An awful lot of PPC campaigns fail because the company sets up PPC adverts that take users to either the company homepage or another unspecific page which does not address what users have seen in the advert. A firm can lose a lot of customers if they don’t have the goods to show people who’ve clicked on their ads.

Enter: the pay-per-click landing page. A bespoke page that exists solely to tell users about the promotion/call-to-action (buy now, register, make contact, etc.) featured in the advert, maximising conversion.

These pages greet users who have come from the PPC adverts and give them everything they need (and expect), answering all of the questions they have from seeing the advert and providing call-to-actions for conversion.

Think of them as like a showroom or salesperson acting on your company’s behalf. They have to speedily convince users that your product is for them – and that your company is the one to trust.

If you take the click on the PPC advert as a ‘tell me more’ from the user, the landing page should offer the next step. People need to be rewarded for clicking on the ad by seeing exactly what they were searching for.

They will expect your advert to take them to the product they want, and they need something to tell them why you are the right business to go to for it. By this stage people would like some more information, but not too much – just enough to allow them to make an informed decision about your product, and you, without having to take too long about it. And not ‘too long’ means seconds.

Pay Per Click Landing Page

Our PPC Landing Page for Building Transformation, offering users plenty of information and a contact form for a free building cleaning consultation.


The Content

When we put PPC landing pages together for clients we know that every element of their design and operation needs to address the above.

With speed key a landing page needs brief but brilliant text that’s informative and inspiring. It can still cater for varying attention spans by including everything essential first (‘above the fold’) with the added detail below. This should be coupled with some relevant imagery of the product or service.

We want to include good, story-telling graphics. In a split second even just the presentation of a product image will give users an impression of your firm and your goods. The visuals can very quickly sell the product and the company.

At the very least including graphics ensures that the firm looks competent. Everyone’s landed on an e-commerce site and thought ‘hell no!’ from just the look of the page (if they can’t fix basics like their graphics then you’re not trusting them with your bank details).

Credibility, then. Alongside effective graphics a few things can reassure visitors (and deter visitors if they are absent). Third party elements are convincing. It is worth considering including brief customer testimonials or quotes, or including content from reviews or media features. These pages are speaking on a company’s behalf, and if they are the only pages users will visit then they need to be able to sell the firm on their own. Details like a phone number or some contact information lets customers know that support is there from the company.

Pay Per Click Landing Page

Our PPC Landing Page for Salecca, featuring striking imagery and a contact form for conversion.


User Experience

Where’s the user at? Do they know what they want to buy yet? As we plan the campaigns from scratch we can tailor the appearance and content of the landing pages to reflect the answer to those questions. We want everything the user sees to be at the same stage they are. The landing page should reflect whether the user knows the product they want, or if they need some advice and the chance to browse.

And it is important for us to keep a simple path from the PPC advert to the firm’s offer. Too many clicks are a bad thing (each click you make people do is said to lose you about 10% of the audience). If we need to get users to another page on a firm’s website to make the purchase then we will include a several calls to action – including clickable images to anticipate different users’ preferences. But it is essential to offer only what the PPC advert has enticed users with.

There are two audiences we are trying to please with a PPC landing page – prospects and search engines.

The Quality Score (QS) of a PPC advert is part of what search engines use to determine its rank and cost per click. It is partly calculated by whether or not the advert links to a landing page, and the quality of any such page. The click-through rate is also important for calculating QS, and of course pitching the landing page perfectly to maximise conversion is going to improve that, too.

For us that means making sure that the content of the landing page is relevant to the advert, has good user navigation and contains the same keywords the adverts are using.

Pay Per Click Landing Page

Our PPC Landing Page for Commensus, featuring a sign up form for a free month of Office 365.


The Process

The first thing we will do is think about the audience and keyword targeting. We put a lot of research into finding words that will target a firm’s specific and niche audiences, giving a much healthier and cost-efficient follow-through from the adverts.

Obviously this work is relevant for the PPC adverts themselves, but the landing pages also need to be tailored to welcome the demographics the ads are going to attract. And the keywords need to turn up on the landing pages (again, users and search engines are the audience – some search engines seriously downgrade adverts that link to landing pages that don’t have matching keywords).

There is something we can do here that is very useful: dynamic keyword insertion. This makes sure that the landing page will change to match exactly what the user has entered into the search engine. For instance, if they specify a location in their search that will appear on the PPC landing page.

Once the pages are created and the PPC campaign is launched the ongoing testing and measuring can begin. This is where we can really fine tune how the adverts and landing pages are targeted. We can focus more resources on the most successful elements and tweak the less successful things to improve them.

To do this we set up several different landing pages. By measuring the results each one gives in detail we can determine the most effective wording and placement of content/calls-to-action on the pages. Our software allows us to see where users tend to click on a page, expecting to find a link or call-to-action, so we can better place the interactive elements. We actually quite enjoy mixing it up and seeing what ‘wins’ (‘Learn More’, ‘Buy Now’, ‘Let’s Go!’, ‘Purchase’, ‘View Range’).

The advantage of PPC landing pages is that, because they offer such well-defined test feedback, they can be fine-tuned more effectively than, say, a homepage. If you want to test how a promotion is working, having users go through your homepage isn’t going to give a very clear picture – there are too many variables and directions people can take to a product. A pay-per-click landing page is a single route to a particular offer, so we can better measure the factors that are helping convince people (or not).

Overall a well-researched and crafted pay-per-click ad campaign with a set of tailored landing pages is going to maximise conversions and minimise advertising costs. It will convince and welcome users on behalf of your company and improve your adverts’ position in search engine results.

If you’d like to know more or ask any questions we’d be happy to talk to you about everything: https://codastar.com/ppc_campaign_management

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