When driving visitors to a specific landing page of your website, it is important to ensure that the landing page is clean and professional looking, with clear and concise calls to action. You will want to make the most out of the landing page, which is especially true when there is a Pay per Click initiative in place. In other words, why spend advertising dollars to send traffic to a page that does not effectively encourage your visitors to complete some sort of actionable step?

So, what types of steps or action items should your landing page encompass? Below are a few that - in my opinion – every landing page ought to have.

• Calls to Action. I would recommend a minimum of two. A few examples include: Download Our Latest Whitepaper, Sign up For Our Monthly Newsletter. View our Portfolio, Buy Now, etc. These are all excellent forms of lead generation for your company and can be then used as a sales tool. Be sure to include any promotions or discounts you may be offering.
• Professional Looking Page. Often times, this is the first impression your visitors will have of your company. Make it count. Display the components of your website that make your company stand out above the rest. I.e. Awards, Certifications, etc.
• Relevancy to what the visitor searched on. For example, if you are a beauty supply site and the searcher typed in Volumizing Shampoo, he/she should be taken directly to the page within your website that supports this search query.
• Simplicity. The page should be concise, with a clear direction as to what you want your visitors to do.

Your landing pages are a very important part of your online marketing mix. Make the most out of them!

If you are currently running an AdWords campaign, or even considering it, a thorough review of your destination urls (landing pages) is very important.  Google, for example, calculates the page load times for landing pages used in pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns and factors that into the overall Quality Score they assign to keywords in the campaign.  Quality Score is an important factor in where ads will be displayed when they are served by the AdWords auction-based system.  Google multiplies the Quality Score and the max CPC for each keyword when assigning a ranking to all ads that are considered relevant for a particular search query.  There are other factors that play a part in determining Quality Score of which some you have little or no control over (historical clickthrough rates) and others where you have direct control over (landing page load time). 

Google recently introduced a new service called Page Speed Service to help test and optimize web page load times.  While I am hesitant to recommend turning over the optimization of web pages to Google, if nothing else, it is an excellent service for those who may have previously been unaware of their landing page load times.  In addition, it gives users insights into what degree of improvement they could see if they were to implement proper changes to their website pages to help improve page load times.

The next time you are optimizing your PPC campaigns, or if you are just starting out with a new AdWords account, be sure to test your landing page load times before you decide on the best place to drive your paid search traffic.  The decisions you make now will directly affect how much you have to pay for placement in Google’s sponsored links.  If you are not sure of your landing page load time, here is a link to the testing service: http://www.webpagetest.org/compare.  The test takes a few minutes to complete for each url you enter, but the wait is worth it, as it could save you money in the long run with your PPC campaigns.

Picture this scenario…

You enter a Sporting Goods Store and ask an associate where you can find the camping equipment section. You are in need of a tent for your upcoming camping trip, plus you’re in a big hurry. It’s your lunch break and you only have a short window of time before you are due back at work. You are there to find your tent, quickly buy it and get back to the office. The associate directs you all the way to the back of the store and to the far right. You follow the instructions and arrive at the destination you were just sent to. You look around for camping equipment, only to find nothing close to that. Instead, you see golf clubs, golf bags, putters, etc. Confused and agitated you scan the store for a sales associate to help you find what you are actually looking for, but sadly no one is around to assist you and the store is so big, you literally have no clue where to go. Tick tock, tick tock goes your watch; a clear reminder that you are in a hurry. Finally, you let out a disappointed sigh and walk out of the store without making a purchase.

This above scenario, while obviously hypothetical, is very similar to what happens far too often in the online world. If I had a dime for every time I click on a pay per click ad and get directed to a page that is completely irrelevant, I’d be rich.  Well, maybe not rich, but I’d have a whole lot of dimes. The bottom line is this…shame on you if you are spending good money on pay per click traffic, yet sending potential shoppers to irrelevant pages. If my search query is campaign equipment, the ad I then click on should absolutely be just that.

Some retailers prefer to send everyone to their home page, no matter what their search query, which is essentially like making your visitors conduct their search all over again. Why would you do that?  You want it to be a “win win” experience. In other words, a win for you; you captured the visitor’s attention to get him to click on your ad in the first place; a win for the visitor, since he was sent to the appropriate page he was searching for. Everyone’s happy and there is a much more likely chance of this visitor converting into a sale if you make the process a seamless one.

If you think it makes little to no difference where you send your paid visitors to, I encourage you to run a test utilizing different landing pages. The outcomes should speak for themselves.