Three Big PPC Mistakes, Part II
. . . And How Newbies Can Avoid Them
In Part One of this article, I talked about the mistakes small business owners and marketers make when they first begin using pay-per-click campaigns. In Part Two, I cover the third biggest mistake people make: sending all PPC traffic to your home page.
Why is this a mistake? Simply put, you seriously lower conversions because you give people too many options to “explore” or you make them click around searching for the product or service featured in your ad – which usually causes them to click right back out of your site.
A better method is to send searchers to landing pages developed specifically for each ad in your campaign. “Advanced search marketers,” says our own Dudley Chamberlain, one of Yield Software’s customer success reps, “create their ad groups, ads, and landing pages at the same time. This ensures they work together.”
When developing your landing pages, you’ll want to include the same keywords, language and offer that you used in the ad. If someone is looking for a white paper on Internet Security, for example, you don’t want to send them to your home page or to a “resources” page that lists a dozen white papers, case studies, and reports.
Instead, send them to an exclusive landing page that includes the title of the white paper (the same title used in the ad), a blurb about the paper and why people should download it, an image of the white paper cover, and the registration form.
Creating landing pages that relate to your ads (and by extension keywords) has an additional benefit: it helps you receive a higher quality score.
According to Google, the “AdWords system calculates a ‘Quality Score’ for each keyword by looking at a variety of factors to measure how relevant your keyword is to your ad text and a user’s search query.”
Ad ranking is determined by multiplying the Quality Score by Max CPC. This means that if your competitor has a higher quality score, their ad can appear higher than yours – even though you may be willing to pay more per click!
(To see your Quality Score within Google Adwords, navigate to the Keywords tab, click the “Filter and views” drop down menu on the right, and then click “Customize Menus.” You’ll then see a new screen where you can then check the “Quality Score” box.)
Increasing your Quality Score – and paying less for clicks! – is why it’s important to set up ad groups for each campaign. Having ad groups allows you to test which keywords / ad copy raises or lowers your ads’ Quality Score.
In addition to assessing your ads, Google also looks at your landing pages. If your landing page doesn’t describe (or match) the keywords and copy in the ad, you get penalized with a low Quality Score.
According to PPC expert Brad Geddes, “Google thinks of searchers as their users, so they want them to have a good search experience so they come back to Google to search again.” Thus, your landing page needs to provide searchers with a good experience.
We’ve covered how to create optimized landing pages in the following posts:
Don’t forget, our Yield Web Marketing Suite can help you manage and optimize your PPC campaigns and landing pages across all three search engines (not just Google). Read about how we can help you, then take our free, no risk, no obligation 30-day trial for a test drive.
