Landing pages are often underrated by companies who can’t fathom the idea that their website isn’t perfect. However, landing pages are meant to compliment websites, not insult them. In fact, if a company’s website was built with a sound strategy, many of the pages on that website will make great landing pages.

According to Wikipedia, a landing page “is the page that appears when a potential customer clicks on an advertisement or a search-engine result link.” The issue that arises with many companies is that they direct visitors to the wrong landing page, because they don’t have a specific landing page to correspond with an ad or they feel that a general landing page will do the job. Let’s look at it another way. What if you bought a plane ticket to Hawaii, your bags are packed and you board the plane looking forward to sunshine, beaches and surf waves. When the plane lands, to your dismay you find that you are in Nebraska. They have sunshine, but they’re missing beaches and surf. This is the way many visitors feel when they click on an ad only to find the landing page has nothing to do with the ad that they just clicked. Landing pages have to be specific, but they also have to coincide with the ad that a person clicks on. Don’t tell them Hawaii and send them to Arizona. 

Another important reason to have a landing page is to get a visitor to complete a desired action. Sometimes a company has a landing page that has the correct information, but lacks a call to action. The visitor gets informed, but they can’t sign-up or buy a product. An example would be a visitor seeing an ad that offers 20% off their blender purchase, if they sign-up for e-mail blasts.  The visitor clicks the ad, lands on a product page about the blender, reads the information and decides they like the blender. Unfortunately, as they scan the page, scroll up and down and right to left they can’t seem to find where they sign-up for the e-mail blast to receive 20% off. They check one or two more pages of the website, hoping to find the offer, and then leave in frustration.  How could this have been prevented? If the company was willing to tweak the blender product page, they could have put a noticeable button or link that said click here to sign-up for e-mail blasts and receive 20% off. The other option would be to create a landing page specific to that offer. Either way the visitor needs to be able to complete the desired action requested in the ad without being hindered.

Landing pages are very valuable; however they have to be used correctly to maximize results. A landing page must direct a visitor to information that accurately corresponds with an ad’s offer and it must clearly show the customer how to complete a desired action. If the pages within a company’s website offer the above, then they are set to get started. However, if a company is missing any of the above, it would behoove them to add landing pages or tweak the pages of their website.

Keyword Insertion or Dynamic Text is a feature that is offered by Google, Yahoo and MSN for the creation of ad copy. It helps to make ads more relevant. In order to use keyword insertion, you will need to insert a code into the ad text. Then, once a keyword is searched, it will automatically replace the code with the keyword that triggered the ad. Keyword insertion has many benefits including increasing relevancy of your ads. However, there are many times when keyword insertion should be used with caution or not at all.

First, many advertisers might choose to bid on misspellings. This can be a cost-effective and strategic way to get more customers to your site, especially since there should be minimal competition. If your keyword is misspelled, then the dynamic text will also be misspelled in your ad copy. It is best to not use keyword insertion when you have misspellings as keywords, especially when it comes to your branded or trademarked terms.

Another case where keyword insertion may not be best is when you are bidding on keywords that are not relevant to the rest of your ad copy. For example, the ad below is talking about visiting Barbados, but the headline says italy vacations. This is a clear case of when you should not use keyword insertion.

Is everyone else using keyword insertion? When compiling research for ad copy, it is always a good idea to see what your competitors are doing. If you see that every ad has the same headline, it is probable that your competitors are all using keyword insertion. This is a great time to make your ad copy stand out.

Keyword insertion is an element that can be used to boost your click through rate and even your quality score; however there can be dangerous pitfalls to using this feature.

I cannot stress enough the importance of having a solid landing page to direct website visitors to. This is especially true when you are running a Cost Per Click (CPC) Campaign. If you are going to pay to drive a visitor to your site, you ought to make sure the visitor is sent to a page that clearly and concisely represents not only your offerings, but more importantly the offering that this particular visitor was searching for. In other words, it is rather frustrating for a searcher to click on an ad for a pair of Nike shoes and instead be sent to a page for Nike shirts. If you’re lucky, your visitor will be patient enough to go through your navigation and locate the Nike shoes page they should have been sent to in the first place. More than likely, however, the searcher you already paid for will just click on the back browser and find another ad. So how can online retailers prevent bounces like this from occurring? Although there is no way to guarantee a low bounce rate, there are steps you can take to improve it and your landing pages are a great place to start.

A good landing page will possess a clear cut call to action. What do you want your visitors to do? Examples: Click here to receive your coupon, Fill out this form to generate your free report, Enter your email address to be added to our monthly newsletter, etc.

In addition and beyond just the importance of user experience, Google very specifically factors in landing page quality and relevance as part of their algorithm. This algorithm determines where your ads will appear and how much you will have to bid. Therefore, having an effective landing page will not only improve the experience for your searchers, but also afford you the ability to garner better online real estate and at a lower CPC.

What are you waiting for? Get busy and start to improve your landing pages!