An internet marketing initiative consists of many different components, which are all critical to a successful and effective campaign. For example: using the best keywords to describe your products and/or services, creating compelling and creative ad copy which stands out, and ultimately, selecting the most appropriate landing page to send a searcher to. Seems simple enough, right?
In most cases, many of my clients prefer to send all of their visitors to the home page of their site. This is not the best solution in terms of conversions, and here is why. For an Ecommerce site, you want to make it as easy as possible for someone to take advantage of your products/services. If your site is for lead generation purposes, you also want to make it simple for the intended action item (request more information, download a whitepaper, sign up for a newsletter, etc.) to take place. By sending visitors to the home page, you are “sort of assuming” that they will get to the page you want them to visit. So now you might be asking yourself, what is the best solution?
Utilizing a specific and focused landing page to drive traffic to is an excellent tool for ensuring that your visitors are initially seeing what you want them to see. You can choose to feature a product on this page (perhaps a top-seller or better revenue producing item/service), or offer an incentive (Free shipping, discounts, etc.) Please also keep in mind that the searchers will have the ability to move around the site as they wish after you have landed them on the page of your choice. In addition, these pages can provide clean, clear and focused conversion points and messages that can easily be changed for any internal promotions or seasons. A landing page specifically created for a paid campaign is an ideal solution to improve the effectiveness of the traffic your site receives.