Don’t waste your money on PPC
The PPC market is huge. Google made 23 billion in advertising revenues in 2009 and for 2010 it even looks to grow with several billions. More and more companies are being convinced of the effectiveness of this type of advertising and shifting more funds towards it.
Buying keywords however is just one part of the story. Yes, PPC will bring new visitors to your website but it’s what happens on your website that will actually turn those visitors into customers or not. The landing page has to live up to the customer’s expectation.
Common mistakes for landing pages
Landing page is a generic page
One of the most common mistakes made for newcomers to the PPC field is that they send the customer to their homepage or a generic page. Let’s look at an example where I searched for a “wooden table”.
The ad from Crate&Barrel came up first. When I clicked it, this was the page it took me to the generic page for furniture.
If I were a real potential customer, I would be disappointed, I had anticipated to find a wooden table but all I see is a menu and some images of interiors but nothing specific on wooden tables. Only motivated customers will look further, I believe C&B has a low conversion rate for it’s PPC campaign and this will be the main reason.
Landing page does not match the customer’s expectation.
Continuing with the “wooden table” example, take a look at where the JC Penney ad takes us to:
If I’m looking for a table, then please, don’t show me a bed.
Let’s take a look at a better example (still not great but ok) for the keyword “buy sofa”
Home Reserve shows me a sofa, shows me a starting price and offers an easy way to browse their sofa catalogue and has a call to action button (which could be better): they met the expectation that I had when the clicked on the ad.
Landing page doesn’t work
Make sure you test your landing pages to make sure they work correctly before you put them online.
Take my search for “car loan”. One of the ads that showed up was:
First of all: Tsssk, tsssk for not using negatives to exclude car loans. Second their ad took me to this page:
They are paying $6+ per click and that is what you see when you land on their site. Horrible!
The minute you notice your site is down or malfunctioning, you should immediately pause your Adwords campaign to avoid losing money.
Landing page has no clear call to action
Ok, your PPC campaign has delivered a visitor to your website. What is he supposed to do?
The site of Guaranteed Auto Lending has no clear call to action. The visitor arrives, is offered a lot to read but it’s not immediately clear what he has to do to apply for a loan? That option is anonymously tucked away in the menu bar.
Landing page has unnecessary steps before information
When you click a Bank of America ad for “car loans”, this is the page you land on:
You have to select your state first before you get to the page about car loans.
Now I could understand this if they would provide you with different information based on your state. The problem is that they don’t. Each visitor gets the exact same page, independent from the state he chooses in the previous menu. Why do you risk losing a significant amount of visitors by adding an unnecessary step? This is sad, especially since the actual sales page is better than average.
Best practices
Separate your PPC landing pages from your conventional pages
The previous example of BOA shows this nicely, there is no menu structure on the page. A landing page has one objective and one objective alone: selling! The more things you put on the page to distract the customer from the sales process, the less likely you will be to convert.
Have a clear call-to-action button and make it stand out
The call-to-action should stand out, therefore turn it into a button:
- Better visibility than a link
- Visitor knows it’s something he should click on
The problem with the call-to-action button on the BOA landing page is that it has the same color as the header section. The header is also a lot larger and will draw the eye more than the button
In this page the call-to-action is a button in a color that contrasts heavily with all other colors on the website and the visitor unmistakenly knows what to do to apply for a loan.
Give the customer an indication of the time it will take him to buy or apply
The web generation has little time to waste. If they get the idea that buying your product is a cumbersome process, he won’t even get started. Give them an indication of how long it will take to fill out your form or if you have a multipage form, how many steps it will take.
Always test
There will always be room for improvement with your landing pages. Make sure you set up a process of A/B testing or multivariate testing to continuously improve the landing page and keep increasing the conversion rate. You’ll be amazed to see how much extra revenue you can obtain from your current traffic volume by making some changes. When you first start out testing, increases of 20 to 30% are not exceptional.
The actual process of testing is beyond the scope of this article but I’ll cover it in a later article. You can take a look at Google Website Optimizer to get you started.
