Paid placement traffic and SEO traffic are two different beasts, so why do we often send both sources of traffic to the same end result? Paid placement marketing campaigns provide something that SEO doesn’t, you have complete user experience control. By not exercising that control, you could possible be handing your business over to your competitors. Landing pages can cater to visitor’s specific needs as spoken by their search queries. Below are a few ways that you can best capture your PPC (Pay-Per-Click) audience with a landing page.
 
Calls-to-action. Websites often don’t have strong calls-to-action available within a click. Keep in mind visitors don’t like to guess what to do and who you are, they want to know immediately. Adding a prominent call–to-action on your landing page will help increase conversions. Tell visitors what you want them to do, don’t just assume they know. Include a brief contact form that will allow you to capture leads without detouring potential customers.

Copy. On average, most websites have an overwhelming amount of content. You need a tight correlation between visitor’s search queries and your website content to engage and capture potential customers. Most consumers are looking for a quick answer to their questions and don’t have the time or patience to read through pages of content. Illustrate your most prominent information in a bulleted or numbered list. Be sure to incorporate your PPC keywords in your landing page copy. This will not only help improve your Quality Scores, but will also help potential customers better connect with your content.

Simplicity – The key to successful PPC landing pages is to keep the user from getting distracted. Limit your navigation and users ability to leave the page or get confused and frustrated. One page with simple, straight-forward content and a relevant form is enough information. If visitors need more information before converting; give them the option to view your full website. You don’t want to distract your paid placement visitors from what you want them to do. Less is more.

Load Times – If it takes more than 10 seconds to fully load your website, that’s to long. It should take less than 5 seconds and could affect your Google Adwords Quality Score. Numerous images, or animated graphics and large flash files, could hinder your load times and if visitors have to wait for a flash animation to load before they can get information about your services, they’re more than likely not going to stick around or even come back.

Always go back to the old school marketing and sales mentality of K.I.S.S (keep it simple stupid).  Avoid clutter, reduce the amount of content that you display and make the calls-to-action prominent. Control the user experience.

Gone are the days of the simple text ads in Google AdWords, with a headline and 2 description lines and the display url. Google now offers several ways to enhance your sponsored ads.

First, geo-targeting ads to a specific location can strengthen your ad because the location will be displayed at the bottom of the ad. For example, this ad is geo-targeted to New York state.

Another way to spruce up your ads is to include the address on the bottom of the ad. This can be done by creating a local business ad. In order to create a local business ad, you will need to create a local business listing on Google. Including an address tells the searchers your exact location without having them look for it all over your site.

Incorporating product images into your sponsored ads is a powerful way to draw attention to your ad. This can be done by creating a Google Base account and linking it to your AdWords account through the Google Merchant Center.

There are many ways to make your sponsored ads on Google more enticing for searchers. No longer is effective ad writing and enticing offers enough. By incorporating these features you can literally stay on top of your competition.

Google’s Ad Sitelinks can help boost your campaign’s performance!  Sonya Wood’s blog post last Friday talked about the beta program Google AdWords has rolled out, called Ad Sitelinks.  With initial tests running on a handful of our clients’ campaigns, early numbers are showing promising results.

The most significant impact in AdWords stats has been on click through rate and conversion rate.  The chart below taken from the Account Snapshot section of AdWords compares November 9 – November 15 when Ad Sitelinks was in place, to the prior date range when additional links were not being used.  While the click through rate (CTR) for this client’s entire campaign portfolio dipped slightly, the campaign utilizing Sitelinks in the ad copy showed an increase over 66%.

Figure A.  All Online Campaigns

Another notable metric that has been impacted is the conversion rate.  Please note the company being featured in this post is an ecommerce website that has historically seen increasing conversion rates throughout the month of November and December.  This is evidenced by Figure A above where we see a 68% lift in conversion rate for the portfolio of campaigns under this account.  This increase was significantly higher for our test campaign utilizing Ad Sitelinks – a stellar 80% lift!

Figure B.  Ad Sitelinks Campaign

Beyond AdWords, we have seen additional positive impact in site usage through Google Analytics.  By providing multiple entry points to the website we have been able to drastically decrease the bounce rate for this campaign – by 49%!  Based on the strong preliminary results yielded by implementing Sitelinks on a single campaign, we have since implemented the option on a number of campaigns within this client’s account.  If your AdWords account has been white listed for this beta opportunity, I strongly encourage you to take advantage of it.