How does PPC work?
Simply put the website owner signs up for an account with AdWords and chooses a variety of keywords that her prospective customers use to find services/products that she has.
She creates a couple of ads that get displayed whenever her prospects search her keywords and she only pays Google when someone clicks on one of the ads. Make sense?
Adwords remains the most effective, cost efficient and fastest method of driving traffic to your website. You won’t find a better method of driving more targeted traffic to your site.
What happens when someone clicks on the ad?
Great question! When someone clicks on your ad you have a CHOICE of where to send them or where they ‘land’. This is where landing pages comes in. A landing page is the destination a search engine user will land on when they click one of your ads.
Most people don’t realize they have a choice and send visitors to the home page of their site. You are one of the lucky ones that gets to learn why sending them to your home page isn’t the best thing to do and what you could be doing to significantly improve the results you get from your advertising dollars.
You should use a different landing page for every type of ad you create. For Product A, let’s say a Camera, you should send them to your camera page. For Product B, let’s say a Digital Memory Card, you should send them to your Memory Cards page on your site.
Continue the Conversation
Let’s backtrack a little to help you understand why. When your prospective customer goes online to search for a product/service like yours they are having a conversation in their head. Don’t you have a conversation going on in your head when you’re searching for something you need on the internet?
For example, “It’s been a while since the last time we decorated and designed our salon. I think our customers want a change – something new, chique, & modern. Let’s see if we can find anyone in the area to design it for us.”
That’s what’s going on in their head before they come to Google. Then, once on Google’s page, they use a variety of keywords and phrases to find what they’re looking for – continuing the conversation in their head.
You, the marketer, have a great opportunity here to jump into the conversation they’re having. You write an ad based on the keywords that people will use and you send them directly to your Salon Design page. It works the same if you were a lawyer that had a variety of services. Send people directly to the page that has the information they’re looking for.
If you don’t have individual product or service pages, then create them, it’ll be worth it.
Most people (not you of course) are lazy and don’t want to go clicking around your site trying to find what they originally thought they’d find when they clicked your ad.
8 Seconds is All You Have
Your ad is costing you money when they click, don’t waste their time and your money by sending them to your home page so they can look around. They’ll be gone in about 8 seconds if they don’t find what they’re looking for. That’s money down the drain.
Send them instead to an intelligently crafted landing page that continues the conversation they were having in their head.
You’re giving them convenience = what they want, when they want it (now), making for a happy customer, which drops the abandonment rate.
What to put on your landing page to grab their Attention? Pique their Interest? Fuel their Desire? Move them to Action?
Those answers revolves around copywriting strategies and I’ll save them for the next issue.
For now, if you’re using PPC advertising, create different ads for different themes/services/products and send the clicker (prospect) to the right page on your site. It can double your sales or lead generation.
[Via Exante]