It’s a question that I am often asked by my clients who are looking to launch their digital marketing strategy: should they focus on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) or Pay-Per-Click (SEM, PPC)?

Too many people are under the impression that their online marketing presence should be guided by one strategy or the other.  I’m here to tell you that the most effective digital marketing strategies take a blended approach, using components of both tactics.

SEO and SEM strategies are complementary ways of achieving the same goal: prominent inclusion in search engine results that lead to traffic to your website.  However, while each is effective and critical tools in your digital marketing arsenal, they each have unique principles that can help you reach your objectives.  Let’s take a look.

SEO, or search engine optimization, is the tactic of using your site’s content, linking structure, blog posts, and social media exposure (amongst other things) to help you rank organically in search engine results. Search engines take all of these cues into consideration when deciding where to rank your site in their results for a particular keyword, like “auto insurance in Rhode Island”. SEO is the critical foundation to your website’s visibility in search engine results. The things that you do to optimize your online content and relationships will have a long-lasting effect on your rankings in search engines.  However, those effects, while critically important, might take a long time to take hold in the search results.  Google indexes your content at its own pace, and the general rule of thumb that search engine marketers go by is that it can take between six and nine months before you begin to realize the results of your on-site optimization.

On the other hand, SEM has more of an immediate impact. Once you build a campaign that targets your specific keyword set, and you set that campaign live, you are eligible to see an instant impact on your traffic and visibility in search engines.  While inclusion in organic search results are merit based, your SEM campaign can force Google (or any other search engine) to place you within the top results of some competitive keywords.  With that newfound visibility, your website is bound to see traffic increase.  That’s what the pay-per-click model does for marketers.   However, the effects of your SEM campaign are not as long lasting as your SEO strategy – that is, unless you have an unlimited marketing budget.  You see, your site is guaranteed inclusion in search engine results for only as long as your campaign is funded.  As soon as your campaign has generated enough clicks to exhaust your budget, your traffic will stop.  The great thing about SEM is that it is a guaranteed source of traffic – if people aren’t clicking on your ad and visiting your site, you don’t pay a cent!

Now that we’ve reviewed the different characteristics of SEO and SEM strategies, it is important to note how they work together.  In fact, our best e-agencies have told us that the best performing digital marketing strategy leverages both SEM and SEO in tandem.  This blended strategy has helped them appeal to a broad and comprehensive audience, and has resulted in their website being a more prominent piece of customer acquisition.

Here are three reasons why you should have SEO and SEM as part of your site’s digital marketing strategy:

These are just three reasons for you use SEO and SEM in a blended strategy.  Doing so will give you a well-rounded digital marketing presence, and likely drive enhanced search engine traffic as a result. Stay tuned to this space for more reasons why you should focus on a blended approach to digital marketing.

It’s that time again – a time when we are reminded to be thankful for what we have, and look forward to things (and gifts!) yet to come.  Most people, this time of year, are asking for jewelry, clothes or video games to satisfy themselves this holiday season.  But you, the savvy marketer, know better than that.  What you want, what you REALLY want, is an optimized and profitable SEM campaign.  This blog post is here to give you some hints as to what you should be asking for from your successful SEM campaign.  If you’ve been on digital marketing’s “Nice” list, your campaign might demonstrate some of these characteristics.

Wish #1: A high conversion percentage (conversions/clicks)

Too many marketers focus on click through rate (CTR, clicks/impressions), when the more important metric is conversion percentage.  With pay-per-click advertising, maximizing your visits is the key to a successful campaign.  After all, the campaign that produces 100 clicks but no conversions is a very expensive branding effort, but the campaign that produces 1 click and 1 conversion provides a positive ROI.

Do these two things to maximize impact of your paid search traffic:

Detailed ad copy should not only persuade search engine users to click on your ad, it should also dissuade unqualified visitors from clicking.  If a user is looking for a red widget, but you only sell blue widgets, detailed ad copy will be attractive to blue widget seekers who are hit with a targeted advertisement, and red widget buyers will be directed away from your ad before they waste your money with a click on your PPC ad.

A landing page, for paid search campaigns, should focus on your conversion point.  Don’t waste space (and your visitor’s attention span) with too much content or too many links pointing away from the page. They’ll have no choice but to focus on your conversion point (contact form, “purchase” button, white paper download).  That focus will translate into a higher percentage of visitors who convert into potential customers.

Wish #2: A decreasing cost per lead

Digital marketers are often focused on a revenue (or potential revenue)-based metric. Cost per lead (CPL) is often a great way to measure your campaign’s performance. Often, CPLs are at their highest at the inception of your SEM campaign, but gradually decrease with constant monitoring and optimization. Generally, the longer your campaign runs, the lower your cost per lead (ideally!).  Keep in mind that clicks (and subsequently, conversions) are more expensive during certain parts of the year (lower search volume during the summer leads to greater competition amongst advertisers), so it is best to take a year-over-year view of your campaign’s performance.  But in general, you should see some efficiencies in your campaign as time goes by.

Constant improvement of your CPL (which is directly impacted by your cost per click) is dependent on constant monitoring of your campaign’s keywords (and groups of keywords, called Ad Groups).  Make sure that you change your keyword bids to reflect the performance of each keyword – increase your bids for those terms that have produced conversions at a tolerable CPL, decrease bids for those keywords that are driving traffic (and eating up budget!) with little return.  Be sure to give your campaign enough of a sample size before making decisions, I usually like to wait for at least 100 clicks before I have enough data to make an informed decision.

Wish #3: More budget!

Okay, I get it.  Every marketer has limited budgets, except, apparently, for these guys.  And one of the beautiful things about SEM is that you can set your marketing budget to whatever you are comfortable with.  But if you DO find yourself with some extra marketing budget at the end of 2011, be sure to put it in the right places.  SEM campaigns will give you a detailed view of which pieces of your campaign are working most successfully, and you’re digital marketing team can help you allocate that budget in the right places. After all, it might be useful to put more budget to search marketing during a potentially slow time of year.

2011 has been a great year, as Search Engine Marketing Continues to be a vital part of your digital marketing strategy. Here’s hoping that, when you open your SEM stocking this Holiday season, you find more candy (conversions and customers) than coal (high CPC’s and no traffic!).

As a Search Engine Marketer, one of the questions that I get asked most by clients is “What determines my position in Google search results?”

It is a popular point of confusion — clients have a separate SEO team establishing the importance of using keywords on their website in order to gain visibility in search results while their SEM team touts the ability to use marketing budgets to force Google to place their advertisement in search results on important keyword searches.  While SEO (search engine optimization) is a merit-based system of ranking, SEM (pay-per-click) is an auction-based system that allows advertisers to gain visibility based on keyword-specific bids.  Let me explain!

PPC results, as we all know, appear at the top and right side of Google search results.  There are ten available positions on each search result page (normally three at the top and seven on the side).  On the surface, Google uses a simple formula to determine how these results stack up against each other.

PPC ads are ranked using this formula:

Ad rank = keyword bid ($) x quality score

Keyword bid (or CPC bid) is the maximum dollar amount that you are willing to pay for each click on your ad for that specific keyword (“car insurance”, in this instance).  Quality score is a Google metric that determines how relevant and useful your ad is to the search engine user. The higher your quality score, the better. Google actually assigns a quality score for each keyword that you wish to advertise for (1-10 scale).

Quality score measures “relevancy” by looking at two things: your PPC advertisement and the page to which you are directing traffic after the click (the “landing page”).  Both must be directly related to the keyword on which you have placed a bid, or else Google will assign you a poor quality score.

For example, if your PPC campaign contains insurance related keywords Google will:

What happens if you have a poor quality score? Good question.  In most instances, this poor quality score will be reflected in a higher required cost per click or in a lower ad rank (if you do not compensate by increasing your keyword bid).  In other examples of ads that are not remotely relevant to their associated keywords, Google will simply not show the ad in search results in an effort to improve their user experience. Remember, Google’s ultimate goal is to provide the exact information that it believes its user is looking for.

Google will determine your specific click cost on a keyword-by-keyword basis, using the formula above. But remember this when wondering how your cost per click is calculated in Google: just because you have bid $4.00 per click for a particular keyword doesn’t mean that you will pay that much.  It is the maximum that you will pay for that keyword.  All things being equal, the advertiser will pay will pay the minimum amount for their ad’s position as possible.  If the quality score is the same for two advertisers competing for the same keyword, the high bidder will pay only $0.01 more per click than the next highest bidder and be placed one rank higher in search results.  Confused?  Don’t be.  Let’s look at an example:

Advertiser 1 has a maximum keyword bid of $10.00 for the term “boise auto insurance”, more than any other competitor. They have a quality score of 8/10. Advertiser 2 has a maximum keyword bid of $8.00 for the same keyword, with a quality score of 8/10.  They are the second highest bidder.  Advertiser 1 will be in position 1 in search results, with a cost per click of $8.01.

You won’t always pay a per-click cost equal to your maximum bid, which is pretty cool!  You can further improve your cost efficiency by doing things to raise your quality score, but that’s a different blog post for a different day.

There you have it – a quick explanation of how Google determines your position and cost in Paid Search results.

One of the great things about a pay-per-click campaign in Google is the ability to access a myriad of data points to judge the effectiveness of your strategy.  The idea is to use all of the data available at your fingertips to make small changes to your campaign so that you can achieve two simple goals:

Sounds simple, doesn’t it?  It is – until you get a look of all the data that gets generated from a paid search campaign.  By the time most advertisers finish looking at their CPC (cost per click), CTR (click through rate), Cost per conversion, conversion rate, etc, their head begins to spin.

With so much information, it’s important to decide which is important enough to act on. My rule of thumb when it comes to deciphering this information is simple: your most important data is closest to your bottom-line business goals.  Why worry about CPC, when cost per lead is closer to the actual sale?  Why worry about the percentage of people who click on your ad (click through rate), when you can focus on the percentage of clicks that turned into a “conversion” (conversion rate)?

When I am working with one of our agency partners on their insurance marketing SEM, and need to do a “quick and dirty” assessment of their campaign’s performance, I have some go-to metrics that I look at first. Let’s take a look at three of them:

• How much have I spend already on this campaign?
• When is my budget projected to run out, based on campaign spending so far?
• What campaigns are spending the most?

After you get a handle on how much you’ve spent, you can get started on looking at metrics that show how your money is performing.  And the first thing I look at is…

One caveat:  as I mentioned in the beginning of this post, the most valuable metrics get as close to the “sale” as possible, so the ultimate indicator of performance is cost per sale (or cost per customer).  If you can directly attribute online sales to your SEM campaign, use a cost per sale as your substitute for CPO — this metric will tell you if your generated revenue is more than your investment in paid search.

• Is my website (more specifically your SEM landing page) effective at driving business?
• What keywords are most successful at driving conversions, and which keywords are just costing me money with very little return?

Your campaign’s conversion rate is a good indicator of how your landing page is performing.  If the page to which you are driving traffic is built with your conversion point in mind (a quote request form, for example), your conversion rate will benefit.  Since you’ve paid for the visitor’s click, you might as well pay attention to their behavior after they have cost you money. Your conversion rate will tell you if you are successful at converting costly visits into conversions.

Your campaign is capable of tracking conversion rate at the keyword level, which is a GREAT metric to be more efficient with your costs.  Does a particular keyword have a high conversion rate?  React to that by pushing up your bid and making that profitable keyword more visible.  Is there a certain set of terms that are costing you money but not producing conversions?  Pause or de-emphasize that term.

Use these metrics as a starting point in evaluating paid search marketing campaigns.  They’ll help you sort through all of the data that you can find in Adwords (or the SEM report that your marketing partner sends to you!), and get to the information that really matters.

If you get lost in all that data just remember to ask yourself one very important question: which data most directly impacts my bottom line?

Most users flock to the internet’s search engines for one thing: to find help.  Help in finding the answer to a question.  Help in solving a problem that they have. Help in purchasing the right car at their local dealership.

Being visible on a variety of keyword searches in Google is applicable and valuable for businesses in every industry.  The world’s largest companies use their websites as the best (and most accessible) source of information about their brand, products, or services. At the same time the world’s smallest companies have established a web presence as a vital lifeline to previously inaccessible markets.

In the end, search engines pull them all together: the smallest companies can compete right next to the largest.  Search engines are the great equalizer of digital marketing.

Or are they?

Not all markets are the same. The search “landscape” for certain industries are more competitive than others.  The big box electronics chains are fighting tooth and nail for top position on keywords like“blu ray dvd player” and “flat screen tv”.

The insurance industry, both personal and commercial products, is no different.  In fact, one leading industry blog just proclaimed the search landscape for insurance-related searches to be the most competitive amongst all PPC keywords. A study conducted on the average cost-per-click (CPC) across millions of keywords found that insurance-related terms were the most expensive, ahead of keyword groups such as “mortgage” and “loans”.

Does that mean that this search landscape is inaccessible and cost-inefficient for the smaller agencies in the industry?  I would offer an emphatic “NO”.  In fact, I believe just the opposite: the high competition in this particular realm indicates the sheer demand for insurance information that potential customers are looking for. Does that mean that smaller agencies should focus their PPC marketing dollars into bids for high-dollar keywords like “car insurance”?  No.  It simply means that these agencies need to have their paid search campaigns strategies modified to get the biggest “bang” for their marketing buck. There is room in this competitive space to be active…and profitable!  After all, if 80% of all insurance customers are beginning their search for their policy online, can you afford to ignore this marketing tactic?

Here are some strategies to be competitive in a competitive paid search marketplace:

With these simple steps, you are well on your way to becoming effective in a competitive advertising space.  Companies of any size can be active in this marketing medium, and capitalize on all of those people who are saying “HELP!” to their search engines.

Here it is — the last installment of my series on driving qualified visitors through your paid search (SEM) campaign.  In part one of this series, I discussed PPC keyword selection as the first two steps in qualifying traffic, and in part two I showed you how to optimize your ad copy in order to drive traffic from the visitors that you’d most prefer.

Remember that qualifying your paid search traffic has two parts:

Also remember that, as compared to organic search traffic (where you welcome visitors in all phases of the sales funnel), the most effective and efficient SEM campaigns can focus on driving visits that produce conversions.  Let your organic search optimization efforts drive the “information-gathering” traffic, use your PPC campaign to target the “purchasing” consumer.

Now that we’ve covered three steps to improve your campaign, let’s dive into the next tactic that will help you drive valuable clicks:

Step 4: Create Landing Pages to Promote Your Conversion Point

You’ve set up your PPC keywords, you’ve created some unbelievably enticing ad copy to get your audience to click … now what? The process of converting your traffic from visitors into customers is technically over, as you’ve now received a visitor from your SEM campaign.  But the most effective PPC campaigns do not stop optimization until after the most important part of this process – the conversion point.  If I am running a campaign to sell a widget, and I’ve received my captive audience through paid search, I want to make darn sure that I make the final piece of their purchasing process is both obvious and easy.

Once I’ve paid for this click, the last thing that I want the visitor to do is get distracted, bored, confused or frustrated. I want to subtly but firmly guide them through the conversion (or transactional) process.  That’s why the landing page in a paid search campaign is so important.  I’ll give you three quick tips to create an effective landing page, all geared towards promoting a conversion point.

Note that the page is simple, does not contain too much text, and provides no linking away from this page.  The visitor, who has arrived on a very specific keyword search (including the word “quote”) is confronted with exactly the type of information that they have requested, and are more likely to convert as a result!

There you have it – four easy steps to generating and converting qualified paid search traffic! Apply these tactics to your campaign and you just might get a more efficient use of your marketing dollars.

In my last post, I began to tackle the idea of “qualifying” leads and visits that come to your site through paid search advertising. After all, if we can help it, we’d rather pay for only those clicks that are coming to your site by completing the action that we desire: purchase, sign up, download, or upload, just to name a few conversion points that online marketers target.  Remember that qualifying traffic has two parts:

If you can optimize your paid search campaign to achieve these things, or at least get better at them, you are well on your way to using your marketing dollars efficiently.

There are several ways to do this tactically. Part 1 of this topic talked about the importance of targeting value-based keywords as well as utilizing “negative” keywords to eliminate traffic from visitors who have very little chance to convert.

This blog post investigates the next step to qualifying search traffic: ad copy optimization.

Step 3: Use Ad Copy to Tell Potential Visitors EXACTLY What You Want Them to DO

Your text-based ad that appears in Google’s paid search results is the last thing that visitors see before clicking through to your site, and thus, incurring you a potentially expensive cost per click. So why not make sure that those users know exactly what they are about to see or do before they add to your Google bill? You can do just that by using language in your ads that talks about exactly what the user will find on the other side of the click.  Let’s continue with an example from our friends in the insurance industry who are trying to get visitors to request a quote for their personal insurance. Can you spot the difference between these two pieces of ad copy?

Ad copy #1

California Auto Insurance

Questions about car insurance in CA?

Click here for more info!

CA-auto-insurers.com

Ad copy #2

Auto Insurance Quotes

Get your free car insurance quote

from Acme Insurance today!

Acme-insurance.com

The first ad entices users to click through to a page that is offering broad, generalized insurance information. This could include answers to the questions “what is auto insurance?”, “where can I find a list of California insurance companies?”, and “where can I get some general insurance questions answered?”.  This ad doesn’t speak at all to the conversion point, and instead will attract many visits from people looking to satisfy general insurance informational search queries.  This will lead to clicks (and cost) from visits that will have a much lower conversion ratio (conversions/clicks).  Many of these people will find what they are looking for (or worse, maybe not!), and immediately exit the site with their search intent satisfied.

The second ad speaks much more directly to a subset of potential visitors who are looking to do a particular thing with their insurance search: get an insurance quote.  The headline (top line) and description lines speak directly to this point, leaving little to the imagination in the way of what lies on the other side of their click.  This will accomplish the two goals that we’ve discussed when trying to qualify traffic:

Research has shown that the better you can match your ad copy to the actual search that the user performs, the better chance you have in acquiring that user.  This is reflected in click-through-rate (CTR), which measures the number of clicks as a percentage of those who are exposed to the ad. If the ad appeals to the searcher, they will click on it.  If we can match our ad to their actual search query, we’re more likely to get the click, and if we target our ad and keywords to specifically target an insurance quote, we’re more likely to get the conversion.

That, folks, is the definition of a qualified visitor!

Stay tuned to this blog for our next step in driving qualifying our traffic: paid search-specific landing page optimization.

For search engine marketers who utilize paid search advertising, defining a campaign goal is amongst the first things to do when planning a campaign launch.  What is the desired result of our PPC efforts?  Is it to enhance our brand image by being visible on relevant and important keywords? Is it to drive web traffic to your site and increases visits?  Or are you trying to get your visitor to be something more, to perform a certain activity?  In the search engine marketing world, we call these actions “conversions”, and they can take many different forms: online retail purchases, information downloads, lead generation (contact information via user input), appointment request, insurance quote request, and many more.

Now that the internet, and our own web site development capabilities, has developed to a point that we can offer our visitors a specific conversion point, it is important to optimize our PPC campaigns to target those users who are most likely to perform our desired action.  Not only do we want to drive paid search traffic to our site, we want to drive qualified paid search traffic to our site.  After all, if we’re paying for the visits, we want to make the best use of our money by doing two things:

Using an insurance agency as our example, how can we best qualify our PPC traffic to convert into a lead, via an “insurance quote request”? Let’s start with these two simple steps to get qualified leads. Stay tuned for my next blog post, which will cover two more steps to qualify your PPC traffic.

Step 1: Target value-based keywords

Sure, broad keywords will drive the most traffic to your site, but are they right for your campaign? The keyword “insurance” has a Google-estimated search volume of roughly 56,000,000 per month, a staggering amount, but it will also cost your company at least $35 every time someone clicks on your ad from this keyword search. Not only is it expensive, but do you really know what the visitor is actually looking for?  After all, if someone is searching on the keyword “insurance”, they could be searching for any number of different things: insurance claim information, insurance careers, insurance research, etc. Do you really want to spend over $30 for every click, just to find out what the intent of the search was?  Me neither.  That’s why it is important to closely examine your keyword list to include some prudent generalized keywords (“auto insurance”, “car insurance”) in your campaign, but also to include some long-tail keywords that will attract those visitors that are more likely to request an insurance quote (“auto insurance quote”, “car insurance quote”, “home insurance prices”, “how can I get motorcycle insurance?”, “Pennsylvania homeowners insurance”).

By targeting these terms, you’re not only driving traffic that is more likely to generate a lead, but you’re also paying less for that traffic. Longer-tail keywords are less competitive in the search landscape, and therefore will cost you less per click than the broad keywords like “insurance”.

Step 2: Eliminate traffic that you absolutely do not want

Now that you’ve targeted the keywords that you are sure will drive qualified traffic, wouldn’t it be cool to eliminate the keywords that you don’t want to target?  Introducing negative keywords.  By utilizing this facet of your PPC campaign, you can tell the search engines which keywords that you do not want you ads associated with. By adding negative keywords to your campaign, you are providing a list of terms that, when a user incorporates them in their search, your search engine will know to never show your ad.  This is particularly helpful because it will cut down on traffic to your site that has very little chance of converting into your desired action.

Continuing with the insurance agency example, and remembering that we are trying visitors to request a quote, I would begin my negative keyword list with terms that are too broad, are not relevant to our conversion point, or are misleading for our product.  With that being said, the first negative keywords that I would target are aimed at careers in insurance.  Add these keywords to your list: careers, jobs, employment, job, career, training.

See what you’ve done?  You’ve eliminated the many people who are looking for jobs from your search universe.  When you’re trying to drive revenue through quotes, why would you want to spend advertising money on people that are looking to further their career?

What other keywords can you think of that would drive traffic to your site, but almost certainly won’t drive conversions?

Check back here for my next post, where I’ll talk about how your paid search ad copy and landing pages can further help to qualify your traffic.

So it seems that online paid advertising spending is here to stay, no? The latest estimates show that online advertising spending will crest at $31.3b this year, which is an increase of 20% over 2010.  That’s “b” … as in “billion”.  This is more than a case of an industry that has reached its peak and is slowing its growth rate — it is an industry whose growth rate is double what it was projected to be at the end of 2010.

I’ve already spent time in this space talking about how paid search marketing is set to take off for the rest of 2011, but now come some new details about where that search growth is coming from. Paid search marketing is comprised of many components, including the familiar Google search results.  But now we know that, behind that explosive increase in online ad spending is something called “display advertising”.   Display advertising is a marketing tool that allows you to show eye-catching ads across various Google search properties (web sites) that are relevant to your business.

The difference between traditional paid search advertising and display campaign advertising is twofold:

Why is that important for you?  It highlights the idea our familiar “search real estate” is always changing. Five years ago the only conceivable avenue for those forward-thinking enough to engage in paid search advertising was to run ads with Google AdWords for PPC.  Now, we have to pay attention to different areas of growth in the industry, where people are getting their ads from different web properties, no longer just from a Google search.  Consider these three pieces of information regarding display advertising:

-        With Facebook advertising, I can run a hybrid image/text ad that only shows my advertisements to women, ages 18-35 in the state of Rhode Island. (Side note: Facebook hit 687 million users worldwide in the month of May)

-        With LinkedIn (the world’s largest professional network with over 100 million members), I can reach all users who have listed “insurance agent” in their profile

-        Twitter (one of the world’s most visited sites) has started serving third-party text ads on its webpage (how long can it be before it incorporates display ads?)

At this point, I want to take a step back for a reality check. The latest comScore data shows that Google Search advertising continues to dominate the landscape, and it shows no signs of slowing down. The fact is Google’s current market dominance and innovative approach to business means that it isn’t going away, or in the words of Mike Tyson, “fade into Bolivian”.

However, as the projections show that Display advertising is the driving force behind an overall growth in online marketing, I ask you two questions:

-        Can you afford to ignore this new mode of digital advertising?

-        Are you the type of company who is going to be at the forefront of a growing advertising trend, or will you be left out?

Contact me with any questions that you have about expanding your SEM advertising into display marketing.

A couple of weeks ago in this blog space, I talked about paid search marketing and what you could do to take advantage of this ever-growing advertising medium.  One of the keys to your PPC campaign, I mentioned, was to create and optimize a landing page that was dedicated to your paid search visitor.

The most common question that I got from readers after that post was this: “Why do I need to create a landing page that only my paid search traffic is going to see?”

The answer is that we need to treat PPC traffic differently than all other web visits, if not for user behavior then certainly because of the fact that you’ve paid for it! Paid search traffic and leads are too valuable to direct to your site’s home page, a generic restaurant menu of all the content found within the pages that follow.  We don’t want to force our visitor to work in their search to find the information that satisfies their search intent, especially when users are much more likely to hit the “back” button (as in “back to Google”) on their web browser than follow a link when they don’t immediately see the information they are seeking.

So what can we focus on to create an effective landing page?  I’m glad you asked. Lets break it down into four categories: Relevancy, Content, Call-To-Action, and Potential Distractions.  And away we go…

Relevancy

When a Google user clicks on a paid search advertisement (or any other search result, for that matter), they expect to see the information for which they’re searching immediately.  As in one click. We can only do our best to satisfy that user’s curiosity, but creating relevant landing pages for your PPC categories is a good start.  It’s a poor user experience to direct a user who has searched on the term “Boston Red Sox” to this page.  A very, very bad user experience.

Perhaps a better example comes from our friends in the insurance industry. Would you direct a PPC visitor who has accessed your site via a $30 “car insurance” click to your home page (which has lots of content and discusses the 40 different types of insurance that you offer) or, worse yet, your home insurance page?  No, you’d want to match the search query with the landing page, and send your traffic to an auto insurance page.  It seems intuitive, but often overlooked: get your PPC visitor to the page where they are most likely to find their desired information as quickly as possible.  Their search query has given you a strong indication of their interests, so make it easy for them!

Continuing with the theme – create unique landing pages for each of your various insurance products. Home insurance, auto insurance and business insurance are all unique enough that you can safely direct traffic to their own landing page.

But once they get to that page, what should the content look like?

Content

Three words: Keep it simple. Your landing page should not be as text-heavy as the rest of your site. This is a mutually beneficial relationship: you’ve bought their click for a reason, and they’ve chosen to click on your ad for (what you hope) is the same reason.  Let’s face it, you want them to perform a specific action.  Why would you bore them with details that could distract them from that action?  Create concise body copy, and limit it to the space “above the fold” on your landing page. Use bullet points to highlight the most important information.

Also, make sure that the content you offer doesn’t contradict your advertisement that the visitor has just clicked on.  If you offer 50% off your widget in the ad, make sure that that is reflected accurately and prominently in your content, because that’s probably what your customer is looking for.

This will help keep the visitor’s trust, but it will also help keep the visitor’s attention.  Attention is important, and we don’t want overcomplicated text to distract the user from the most important part of your page …

Call To Action

As I said, there is likely a specific reason that you have paid for your visitor’s click.  Well, here it is.  You want them to do any number of things: buy a t-shirt, download software, fill out a lead generation form, submit a video, or research a Petite Lap Giraffe.  Hey, it’s your site, do what you want.  I’m not here to judge.

The point is, be sure to clearly establish and feature your CTA.  If you are offering a free auto insurance quote, be sure that the lead form is front and center for the visitor. It should be obvious that this is what they are supposed to do – fill out a form. Don’t make your visitor hunt on the page for the lead form, or for the “download” button, or the “add this item to your cart” link.  Some quick tips:

Author’s note: The Lap Giraffe page is a terrible landing page for PPC.  All I wanted to do was look for the “Click Here to Purchase a Lap Giraffe”, and there isn’t a conversion point.

So now we’ve gotten the user’s attention with our ad, given them short and focused content to read, emphasized the call to action — now what?  Keep them from going somewhere else by reducing …

Potential Distractions

When I refer to “distractions”, I’m talking about opportunities for users to leave our landing page. We have a captive audience for our conversion point; I don’t want to give them any reason to leave this page that I’ve created specifically for them. To do this, simply reduce the number of links pointing to other pages — even other pages on your site.

Unlike your homepage, which I view as a gateway to information on your site, your PPC landing page is the destination. By eliminating all of the links that would make perfect sense on your home page, your PPC landing page will give your visitor fewer reasons to navigate away from this conversion point.

_____________________________________________________________________________________

So there you have it, some tips to help give your PPC visitor the information they are looking for, a conversion point to focus on, content to satisfy their search, and limited means to click away from your page. If done correctly, the positive effect should be seen in your conversion rate (# conversions/# visits).

If you’ve paid for the traffic, gently nudging your visitor to perform the activity that will help your business is very important.  Creating a custom landing page will help do just that!