Intelligent PPC

With many chores, there is a certain order in which you have to perform various tasks or your outcome will be disappointing. For example, when you clean your house, if you start out vacuuming the floor right off the bat before you’ve dusted, and before you’ve picked up other things out of the floor, your vacuuming effort will not be as effective and you will have to come behind yourself and do it again to get it done right, after all the other cleaning has been finished. The thing is that for many people, vacuuming is the least tedious part of the job and the one they want to dive into.

Launching a PPC account is like vacuuming. It’s probably the least tedious part of the entire pay per click campaign, but it’s not the first thing you should do. If you jump into building keyword lists and ad groups and writing ads right off the bat, you are skipping a couple of really important steps that are necessary to ensure that you don’t waste your PPC budget right out of the gate. The most important of these steps that gets skipped on a regular basis is the development of converting landing pages. Stop and read that last sentence again – it says converting landing pages. Remember that – we’ll come back to that in a bit.

Many PPC advertisers forget that once the ad gets clicked on, the shopper is in freefall – what they do after that click (which has cost you money) is totally dependent on where they land.

Why Do I Need This “landing page” You Speak Of?

Usually, the first thing a new PPC campaign builder does is build a keyword list. Usually, these keywords lists are extensive, because even after years of admonition, the general opinion is that you need a huge keyword list to do well with pay per click ads. We’ll cover what’s wrong with that kind of thinking later. For now, you have a keyword list that you’re stuffing with everything you can think of that a person could possibly type in when looking for the things you sell. Now it’s time to write ads and you need a destination URL – www.mysite.com, yeah that works, let’s use that.

What’s wrong with this picture? To begin with, let’s step away from the role of advertiser and look at what happens when you’re a shopper using a search engine.

If a shopper plops into your site’s main page but they clicked on a specific part number, or an item name, or even just a brand, they’re going to be irritated that they now have to look for that item and it’s not all that likely that they will stick around long enough to do that – after all, the logic for the shopper is: “if someone wanted my business badly enough to PAY for an ad on this stupid part number, why didn’t they take the time to put me in the right place when I got here?” Someone who caters to get the click, but who doesn’t bother to take the time to make sure their shopper ends up in the spot most appropriate to what they clicked on sends a bad message to the shopper – they cared more about the click than about servicing the customer. In the minds of many online shoppers, this translates into “they just want the sale, they don’t care about my needs. This is bad service.” That not only becomes a wasted click, that is the beginning of an antagonistic relationship that you now will have to overcome, assuming they don’t leave your site immediately after getting there.

I Only Sell One Thing – Why Can’t I Use My Main Page?

The landing page of a PPC account has basically one job – to make the sale. If you have a site that sells thousands of items that people will look for by part number, you could be fine having internal catalog pages as destination URLs for ads that serve in ad groups where those parts are in the keyword list. But what if you sell a service like landscaping? Your pay per click campaign becomes a lead generation service. Since every click costs money, your landing page has a very specific job – to collect the lead. That’s all. The landing page needs to be designed to do whatever it takes to convince the user to give you their contact information. Face it, most “home” pages are not designed to do anything but talk nice about your product or service, then shuffle them off to the proper section for further activity. That’s not enough for generating leads from PPC ads.

You have to design a page that accomplishes a lot in a small space - you have to convey your specific value to the user, you have to explain why you’re the best source from which to obtain that value, you have to convey your trustworthiness, and you have to offer adequate incentive in order to get the user’s contact information. Probably about half the time, you simply won’t be able to get all of this information plus the contact form into a single page view but you can put up several different landing pages focusing on different aspects. If one outperforms the others, you might want to refine that one and use it exclusively for that ad group. But until you create and test a few pages that are designed from the ground up specifically to collect this contact info from the user, you won’t be able to realize the full potential of your paid ad campaign.

Is That All?

Of course, there is a little more to it than having a page able to make the sale. You also have to have a page that makes the grade – the Quality Score mechanics on the paid ad platforms will “read” your landing pages and rate them on keyword relevance, editorial guidelines, and load time. You’ll need to remember that spiders don’t read words in images, so textual content has to be present in order for your pages to be deemed relevant. And the relevance is connective – keywords have relevance to ads and landing pages, ads have relevance to words and landing pages, landing pages have relevance to words and ad text.

Group your keywords tightly so that they are relevant to one another, write your ads so that they accurately reflect the keywords in the group, and build your landing page so that it’s relevant to the words in the group because that’s what searchers will be typing in when they see the ad. You don’t want to break the congruence between the searcher’s thought process and the final landing point. If they click on your ad and then once on your site have any question about why they landed on the page they’re on, you broke the chain.

If you have issues with conversion, remember, that’s the landing page’s job. If you don’t take the time at the beginning of the process to develop landing pages that are able to convert (get a sale, collect an email address, etc), then no matter how extensive your keyword list is, or how catchy your ads are, all you’ve done is cost yourself money and effort because you didn’t first ensure that those users land in a place designed to make the most of their motivation. It’s like vacuuming the floor then dusting off that grimy ceiling fan…

Check out the preceeding article about understanding PPC systems, posted on Metric Voodoo