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.

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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!

Remember the days when important breaking news had the average American family huddled around a radio or TV as the only source for fresh information?  Yeah, me neither.  But apparently, it happened!  Well those days are long gone, as Americans and news-watchers worldwide are now tethered to their smart phone or within arm’s distance from their laptop.

The first thing that I did when I heard that Osama bin Laden had been killed was head straight to my closest source of unbiased real-time news: Google. Apparently, and not surprisingly, so did you.  And so did your kids — well, on Yahoo!, anyway. Search engines have become the gathering place for our news, and have shaped the way we receive our information.  But few people realize that it works the other way, too: historic news events have shaped the way that search engines function.

Take, for example, the events of 9/11/01 – do you know how much Google’s offering has changed since that event? It is hard to imagine that, in the hours after this terrorist attack, the world’s largest search engine had to use its familiar home page link to cached news services because Google had not yet featured a “news” section in their search results! Now, blended search results in Google are populated with trending news links (in their own section), relevant images, and even social media updates that refresh before your eyes.  Check out a simple Google search for “2011 NHL playoffs”, and you’ll see what I mean.  These new facets of search were not always available, and in some cases, were born out of necessity due to current events that have caused us to run to our favorite search engine.

But what about social media and its place in current events?  Well, you might have read that an IT professional might have been the first person in the world to report the attack on bin Laden’s compound late in the night on Sunday, via Twitter!  With such a huge critical mass of users in the Twitter universe, it has become a source of instant news for users who can’t even wait for an article or blog post to be uploaded to their favorite web site.  The result?  Sunday night’s events provided Twitter its highest sustained activity … ever … with an average “sustained rate of tweets” of 3,440 per second.

So what’s next for the social media giant?  How about capitalizing on current events with text ads? It could happen.

The point here is that two things have changed with regard to how our culture accesses its news information:

The internet is an exceedingly adaptable animal, which is part of its appeal.  As a search engine marketer, watching how the internet adapts to breaking news is almost as interesting as the breaking news itself.

Almost.

Internet marketing is here to stay.  Whether it is search engine optimization, pay-per-click advertising, or social media outreach, your business is likely participating in some form or fashion within this growing industry.  The state of Search Marketing is good, and growing.

In fact, as the new Director of SEM for Astonish Results, I’m particularly biased towards the news that paid search spending is projected to grow another 16% in 2011. Coming on the heels of a 14% increase in PPC spending in 2010, online marketing continues to be an effective and efficient marketing tool for companies in any business vertical.

Being new to this blog, I’ll offer some of suggestions that can help you take advantage of this booming business.  You’ll hear from me from time to time, offering tips and tricks when it comes to optimizing your PPC campaigns and updates on this ever-changing advertising medium.

In the meantime, let’s talk about a few things that make a good SEM campaign great. The following tips won’t guarantee a successful campaign, but they’ll get you closer to reaching its potential.

• Take a holistic approach to search marketing. The best performing campaigns that I’ve run have always used PPC in tandem with their SEO strategy. We all know that these two forms of digital marketing are vastly different from one another, but too often we choose one over the other. I’m here to tell you: don’t choose!  Supplement your SEO efforts by utilizing PPC to run paid advertisements on keywords that you are having trouble ranking for organically. At the same time, support your SEO by analyzing PPC keyword data: identify new keyword opportunities by investigating all of the keyword searches than resulted in a PPC visit to your site. Is your PPC data showing that users are searching on a different type of vernacular to get to your ads?  Incorporate that into your site’s content. The strategy is to use the available data from each form of digital marketing to inform the other, so that they work hand in hand.
• Test, refine … rinse, repeat. Search engine marketing is one of the most measurable forms of advertising in today’s business world. But what do we do with all of this available data? Use it to our advantage, of course, by testing different campaign tactics and strategies against one another. Not sure which ad copy is the best? Run two pieces of ad copy against each other, and pick the one with the best click-through-rate after 100 clicks for each ad. Don’t know what match type to use for your keywords? Set up two mirror campaigns for your keywords, setting one campaign to “phrase match” and one to “exact match”. Create another campaign with targeted keywords (long-tail terms) and set it to “broad match”. After a while, you’ll be able to tell which match type is most cost effective for you!
• Establish a conversion point, and assign a value to that conversion. Online retailers have it easy: a PPC visitor clicks on an ad, and either buys your product or doesn’t. Comparing the ROI for these types of campaigns is relatively easy, but what if you’re not an online retailer? What if you don’t “sell” something on your web site? It doesn’t matter, set up a conversion point anyway. Do you offer personal insurance products but don’t sell them online? Collect a lead from PPC by advertising for a free auto insurance quote. Are you a hospital chain with an online presence? Create an online appointment request form and drive your PPC traffic to that form. These may not be direct sales, but these “conversions” are a more effective performance metric than simply counting visits to your site.  Your challenge is to assign a value to these conversions. Once you’ve set that value for your PPC conversion point, compare the “revenue” generated by these leads to the cost it took to acquire them.  You’ll have a better understanding of how effective your PPC campaigns are.
• Have a dedicated PPC landing page. So, you’ve driven paid search traffic to your site … now what? Well, the best performing PPC campaigns have a unique dedicated landing page served up to only those visits that come through SEM. If you are sending PPC traffic to your home page, you’re likely losing valuable conversion opportunities for two reasons: first, the information you’re providing is too broad for your PPC audience (who have a specific search term in mind); second, there are far too many opportunities for a visitor to navigate to other content on your site (and thus away from your desired conversion point).  This is the difference between a well-optimized home page and a dedicated PPC landing page: your site’s home page is designed as a broad gateway through which users can find a wide array of content, while your PPC page is designed to entice your visitor to perform one specific action (“Request a free auto insurance quote!”, “Download this white paper!”)

Come back to this space frequently to check out my thoughts on Search Engine Marketing and Pay-Per-Click advertising.  After all, if American’s performed almost 19 billion searches in the month of March alone, shouldn’t you be paying attention to your Search Engine Marketing strategy?