An explanation of how optimising landing pages for pay per click can increase the profit of a campaign and the return on investment (ROI) of every click.

PART 1

1. Introduction to Landing Page Optimisation
2. Choosing a landing page to optimise
3. Optimising landing pages for conversion
4. Optimising landing pages - A practical example

PART 2

1. Usability optimisation on landing pages
2. Testing the optimisation of landing pages
3. The Google landing page quality score
4. Conclusion

Introduction To Landing Page Optimisation

Paid advertising campaigns can be used to achieve any number of goals. Advertisers may want to generate orders, create new leads, buy cheap traffic for advertising revenue, collect e-mail addresses or even just promote their brand. However, the measurability of PPC has meant that it is primarily a direct response marketing tool, and the ROI of every click is vital.

One of the key factors that advertisers should consider when looking to increase the profit of a campaign is optimising the landing page - the page that the user ends up on when they click on your ad. By optimising the landing page you will ensure that your site is converting as many of your paid visitors as possible and that you are making the most of your spend. Advertisers that fail to take this into account may be wasting valuable profit margins, or writing off potentially good campaigns that have been unsuccessful simply because they were not given a fair chance. Advertisers that make the most of their pages find that they get more sales for the same spend, make better margins and can therefore put more money into advertising.

Choosing a landing page to optimise

The first step to optimising your landing page is to choose the right page to start with. Inexperienced advertisers can sometimes point all of their adverts to one page on their site, forcing paid visitors to search your site to find what they are looking for. Pay per click advertising on networks such as Google, Yahoo and MSN is a powerful tool, and these networks allow you to make your campaigns as granular as you would like. If you are advertising for multiple products or services, split your campaign into different groups for each product and make your ad text and landing page specific to each product that you are targetting. Removing that extra step needed to purchase your goods or services will make your users all the more likely to convert.

Optimising landing pages for conversion

The next stage is to make sure you optimise the best landing pages possible for the user. It is a general rule in pay per click marketing that the user should see consistency across the entire buying process. If a user enters the search term "japanese dictionary", then they are more likely to click on adverts that contain the exact term "japanese dictionary" (preferably in the advert title) and are more likely to convert on a page with the words "japanese dictionary" displayed to them immediately and prominently. The technique for optimising landing pages can be taken to the extreme - some advertisers will make multiple versions of the same page to deal with different variations of popular terms, while others will interogate information sent to them by the user's computer in order to work out exactly what the user typed into the search engine. This level of optimising landing pages can be successful in some circumstances, but are probably overkill for the average retailer or service provider - instead it is usually adequate to bear this rule in mind when designing your landing pages and adverts and try to cover as many of the key terms as you can.

Optimising landing pages - A practical example

To keep with our Japanese Dictionary example, an inexperienced retailer may advertise on the term "Japanese dictionary" with the following ad text:

Cheap Kodansha Dictionary
Low price reference books for
university and college students.
www.cheapreferencebooks.com

When the user clicks on the advert they may be taken to a dictionaries page with the headline "Low Price Dictionaries for Language Students" and a list of dictionaries on the page for the user to look through. At no stage throughout the process has the user's very clear requirement of a "japanese dictionary" been re-enforced, and the user is instead made to take unnecessary steps to purchase the product they want to buy.

In an ideal world the advertiser may have presented the advert:

Japanese Dictionary
Low price Kodansha Japanese
dictionary. Free delivery.
www.cheapreferencebooks.com

When the user clicks on the advert they would be taken to the "Kodansha Japanese Dictionary" product page, with the words "Kodansha Japanese Dictionary" clearly written in large type at the top of the page, immediately in view of the visitor when they arrive at your site. This will show the user at every stage that you are taking them in the direction that they want to go, and that the service that you provide is the one that they want.

To continue reading about how to optimise your landing pages for usability, how to test and measure the optimisation of your landing pages and how optimising your landing pages can have a positive effect on your Google Quality Score, continue to read Optimising Landing Pages For Pay Per Click - PART 2.

Sayu specialise in pay per click management services. By utilizing PPC statistical techniques, long tail marketing and proprietary automated bidding software they can reduce overall advertising spend and increase the quantity and quality of traffic that is provided by a client's internet advertising campaigns. To find out how you can increase your PPC profitability, receive a free tailor-made health check of your current PPC campaign by calling the Sayu Team today on 0800 634 8283 or by visiting http://www.sayu.co.uk/ppc-management.html