Wait, what’s a landing page? When someone clicks through a link on the search results page, it is the first page they go to, or “land” on. For most of you reading this who are running PPC campaigns, your landing page is likely your home page.

Why do these pages matter?

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve taken over a campaign for a client, only to see they are spending $5k+ a month and sending everyone to their home page.

Can this work? Yes. Is it ideal? No.

Let me give you an example: Recently, I had a client in a large US city ask me to add some additional services to his campaign, namely focused on city tours. I told my client I didn’t think this was a good idea, unless he created a custom landing page.

There are two reasons for this:

#1 – Google will award the page a higher quality score, which means a higher average position and a lower cost per click.

#2 (and most important) – Conversions will be MUCH higher.

Here’s an example: say you are looking for vegetarian organic cat food and Google “vegetarian organic cat food.” You click on a random result and a page comes up. After quickly scanning the page all you seem to find is “cat food” not “vegetarian organic cat food” and just as quickly as you clicked on the result you click the back button.

This happens OVER AND OVER every day to businesses that use Adwords (and Bing Ads), to varying degrees. If the titles and heading tags on your landing page do not closely match the user’s query, it is very likely they will click off. They will look at a picture or two, scan the site and usually within a few seconds decide whether or not they’ve found what they’re looking for.

MAKE YOUR LANDING PAGES MATCH YOUR USER’S QUERIES!

If you are spending more than $1k a month on Adwords, you might want to consider custom landing pages. Sending everyone to your home page can work, but only if you offer a small set of services, in a highly specific location.

I have clients that have larger sites that have pages for things like “Wedding Limos,” and “Limo for Prom,” etc. and that can work but you want to have a form on those pages as well, not just your home page.

People are lazy. They don’t want to have to look for things.

Put a form on all of your landing pages. Just do it.

Oh, and if you spend over $1000 per month on Adwords, or PPC in general, you might want to consider having some custom landing pages built, and A/B testing them.

Need some help? Give the Limo Agency a call and we can show you how you can start getting a better ROI from Adwords, and online marketing in general. Call us at 888-758-7973 or visit us online at www.limoagency.net. You can also drop me a line atMark@LimoAgency.net.