I’m putting together a series of posts about how we approach PPC campaign management for our clients.

I plan on writing about:

• Quality Score & You
• Campaign organization
• Why cost per conversion isn’t ALWAYS the best metric
• Aligning your efforts with business goals

Today however – I’m going to talk about why landing pages are so important to success and how testing with Google Website Optimizer makes it easy to get more bang for your buck.

Landing Page Optimization

First – let’s start with a little statistic that comes from looking at our own PPC clients Amplify Interactive. The clients who use dedicated landing pages/sites for their PPC program get conversion rates in the double digits. The clients who don’t – get single digit conversion rates. So, in our experience – sending your PPC clicks to on-topic offer-oriented landing pages with good content and an obvious call to action essentially doubles your conversion rate. Seems like an obvious choice right?

What if I were to tell you that not only can you double your conversion rate by creating dedicated landing pages, but you could substantially improve on that conversion rate improvement again by running some simple tests using a FREE testing platform? Not surprisingly, our clients who do dedicated landing pages also embrace testing. In every case that we’ve done landing page optimization – we’ve acheived AT LEAST a 20% conversion rate lift – even when they’re already getting double-digit conversion rates! Seems like a pretty worthwhile investment right?

But here’s the amazing part – despite the evidence, we still have a hard time convincing clients that they should dedicate the time & energy to creating landing pages and running conversion optimization experiments! Despite all the progress that we’ve collectively made in our thinking about Web marketing – many Web marketers are still more obsessed with sending more traffic instead of converting more of the visitors that they are already getting.

Here’s the other thing about testing – we’re always surprised about the things that influence conversion. Whether it’s size and position of call to action, images on the page, wording of the page & headlines, etc. But the number one lesson is – you don’t have to know what is going to work best. With testing, your visitors will tell you what works best. So try testing some simple things – images, buttons & headlines – and find the magic combination for converting your visitors and substantially improving your conversion rates!

Let’s also consider the impact that landing pages have on quality score. PPC vets know that quality score determines how much you pay per click and where your ad can appear. Along with other factors, landing page “quality” has a direct impact on your quality score (see Google’s own landing page guidelines). So basically – if your landing page is ‘better’ – you’re going to have a better quality score which translates directly to cost per click and ad position. All of which help to drive down your cost per conversion/acquisition/sale/lead.

I hope I’m making the case for PPC landing pages & landing page optimization here.

Contact us if you want to talk more about PPC campaign management & optimization.

For more information:

• Related Post: PPC Landing Page Testing and the Joys of Google Website Optimizer
• Google Website Optimizer
• The Google Website Optimizer Blog
• Our PPC campaign management services