The landing page is the second point of interaction with the consumer, the PPC ad on the SERP was the first. However, the landing page is incredibly important in achieving the desired results for a Pay Per Click (PPC) campaign; it can be the vital difference between realizing return on investment and realizing you've made a mistake.

Landing pages should be created with the conversion in mind. What is it that you want the user to do once they have hit your landing page? Far too often PPC ads are directed to home pages or to other keyword related pages within the site, however, a landing page should be created to immediately receive the user from the PPC ad and immediately provide the information promised in the PPC ad. If your ad has a 'buy now' call to action, the landing page should be the beginning of the purchase process, if the ad copy promises specific product information, the information should be the on the landing page.

The quality and content of the landing page are the key determinants of whether the user will stay on the site or click the back button. It's easy to blame click fraud for pages with high bounce rates, but even easier to create a terrible landing pages.

The most common cause for conversion abandonment is the inability for the landing page to develop enough trust with the user to make them feel confident to move forward in following the conversion path. Landing pages should have a professional look and feel to convey as much as possible the validity of the organization. Any supporting information proving the validity of the organization such as third party verification (Verisign, Truste), industry accolades, professional accreditation and customer testimonials are valuable resources to developing trust with your prospect and convincing them to follow the conversion path.

Attention specifically needs to be placed on conversion rates with respect to PPC campaigns. Defining what the conversion is and how to most effectively measure the conversion is important in determining what the conversion rate is. Whether the site is attempting to get registrations for leads or making high value sales will affect conversion rates. Knowing what is important will define your conversion point. With many B2B sales transactions, a lead can be the important objective to move the sales process to the offline world, where most B2B transactions are closed.

To measure conversion rates and conversion path abandonment, analytics packages are required, such as Google Analytics, HitBox, or Omniture SiteCatalyst to determine where the losses are occurring and what content is most important to the user. It is also important to remember to track secondary and tertiary conversions from a landing page as this will impact your overall conversion rate and estimated ROI.

If they say an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, who cares about 0.02% if you can fix your landing pages and encourage more leads or sales, consider that minimal percentage a tax write off.


Kyle Grant
Sponsored Search Marketing Strategist
Search Engine Positioning by Searchengineposition
Enquiro Full Service Search Engine Marketing

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