If you’ve been reading the previous instalments of Top Position’s 5 minute pay per click masterclasses, you’ll be forgiven for concentrating all of your time and creative energy on the hierarchy and structure of your Google AdWords campaign.

This lesson however looks at an important aside; the quality of the landing pages you direct your pay per click adverts to.

Although falling more generally under the banner of web site optimisation, landing page quality and content also plays a hugely important role in the success of your pay per click campaign.

Not only will a good landing page provide users clicking on your ads with all of the information and persuasion needed to follow through their interest with a purchase, but it will also contribute to an improved PPC quality score. This can lead to a lower cost per click, lower minimum bid per keyword and increased positioning on the search and content networks.

So how do you choose a good landing page for your pay per click advert?

1. Relevance

The key to securing the most appropriate landing page for your advert is to deep link individual adverts to the page on your site that most reflects the pay per click ad content. If your advert highlights a particular product, send that advert through to the corresponding page on your web site.

A common beginner’s mistake with pay per click is to send all adverts through to the web site home page. Not only will this lose you quality score points, there’s also a danger of losing potential revenue as users struggle to find the original offer or product promised in the ad.

2. Content

The internet is an interactive medium making voice and image an integral part of any web site. However, written content is still king. Original and informative web site copy is a powerful weapon and can help turn surfers into shoppers and browsers into buyers.

Don’t stick to empty product descriptions – if your AdWords ad is succinct and punchy, maintain the tone with similarly well honed web page content. Tell your web visitor how your product or service will fill a gap, meet a need or provide an extra little luxury.

3. Test The Waters

As has been previously discussed in this pay per click masterclass series, testing is an integral part of the PPC experience. Advertisers opting to rotate adverts and change landing pages are collecting useful data which can be analysed and used to refine the performance of a campaign.

Monitor which landing pages work best for different types of adverts and then try to extend that success across the rest of the campaign. If you have a landing page that fails to perform, consider revamping it with new text, multimedia elements and pictures.

pay per click
search engine optimisation