You may have heard that you need dedicated landing pages for your Pay Per Click campaigns. That they help increase conversions and lower the cost-per-click. But if you already have a website that has all the information about your products and services, do you really need to go through the trouble of setting up individual landing pages? Wouldn’t it be easier just to send visitors to your homepage? Does it really matter what page you send them to?
First let’s take a quick look at what landing pages are and why they exist.
What Are Landing Pages?
Dedicated landing pages are distinct, standalone pages that are specifically developed with a single purpose or goal in mind, whether that’s to advertise a specific service or sell a single product. They should be separate from the main site, with little to no navigation. The point of the landing page to help the visitor quickly find exactly what they were searching for so they don’t feel overwhelmed or lost and leave. The more your landing page matches your visitor’s search queries, the better.
How Do Landing Pages Help PPC Campaigns?
Simplicity and relevance. Simple design with one clear focus along with providing relevant information to the specific search query allow landing pages to increase conversions and lower the cost-per-click of your pay-per-click campaigns. Let’s explore that a little more.
Landing Pages Improve Quality Score
Google AdWords uses a grading system known as a Quality Score to rate your PPC ads. A higher quality score reduces your cost per click and improves your ad rank, allowing you to get more value out of your campaign. One factor that determines your Quality Score is the quality and relevance of the landing page.
Other factors are:
- Your ad click-through rate (CTR)
- The relevance of each keyword to its ad group
- The relevance of your ad text
If you use your homepage or even a product or service page as your landing page, you risk a lower quality score than if you created a specific landing page for each PPC ad or ad group. Creating specific landing pages for your PPC campaigns ensures it is truly relevant to the campaign, resulting in a better Quality Score and more cost effective PPC campaign.
Landing Pages Increase Conversions
PPC efforts should be focused on trying to increase sales or conversions rather than increasing brand awareness. Since you are literally paying for every click, you are investing money into each and every one of those visitors so it’s more important to capture these visitors and get them to take action.
Limiting the amount of information they first see when arriving at your site and ensuring that it matches exactly what they were searching for is one way to increase the likelihood that they will complete an action, fill out a form, sign up for your newsletter or make a purchase.
More Landing Pages Mean More Leads
The more landing pages you have, the more offers you can promote, giving you more opportunities to generate more leads. You can and should also use your landing pages to test specific offers and calls to action to see which ones offer the highest conversion rates. Which brings us to our last point.
Landing Pages Generate Valuable Insights
Using landing pages provide valuable insights and data that can help you determine whether or not PPC campaigns are the best place for you to spend your ad dollars. They can help you determine efficient channels for generating leads (say if you use the same landing page on GoogleAd words and Facebook, but it has a significantly higher conversion rate on one over the other) as well as help you to identify the right message or call-to-action though A/B testing. This valuable information can be used to increase user experience, focus your ad spend and result in a lower cost per lead.
Get More Out of Your PPC Campaign with Landing Pages
Landing pages can be an invaluable part of your PPC campaign. They improve ad performance, reduce advertising costs and help improve conversion and lead strategies. We can design targeted landing pages tied to your pay-per-click or other marketing efforts. We can also manage your PPC program, either as a standalone service or by integrating it with other digital marketing channels such as SEO, social media marketing, A/B testing and more. We will work with you to choose the right mix for your business. Give us a call today at 414-465-2285 or contact us online to learn more about our PPC and Landing Page services.
