Focus On Your Paid Search Landing Pages

Focus: Enhance Paid Search Success by Paying Attention to the Landing Page.

As hard to believe as this sounds in 2014, there are still marketers out there who point niche service and product paid search online ads in blanket carpet bombing style to their company homepage. Just this week I learned about an otherwise talented marketer who directs virtually all of their Adwords ads for a range of complex instruments and services to their company homepage. They wanted to "promote their brand", but they ended up harming the lead generation needed to support "the brand". This sort of behavior is not uncommon.

This less-than-brilliant-behavior can be frequently spotted, especially with Google Adwords. If a competitor engages in such foolishness (and they do) I silently chuckle and thank them for their misdirected efforts. One competitor ran a niche ad for a very specific service, but splashed the ad across an extensive shotgun range of search terms. That poor ad appeared for wide range of non-relevant services for years, equivalent to advertising neon soccer balls to searchers who were looking for canoes, baseballs, and basketballs. This effort was a waste of time and money for my competitor, and for potential clients searching for solutions.

In another recent landing page fiasco, I informed some colleagues that major a competitor was running an ad in Adwords for a key search term they coveted. This caused some initial consternation until I pointed out that the competitor had screwed-up.... they were directing their hard-fought (and expensive to click) ad to their homepage, and there was no link to the service their ad was promoting! Any visitor was in effect stranded and marooned in that situation.... and likely bounced right out of that website. Any clicks bought by that ad were wasted.

This sort of PPC self-inflicted sabotage should remind folks that blindly directing limited paid search ad money to the homepage can be self-defeating and a waste of budget. Chose your landing pages wisely!

Precise landing page targeting matters for paid search:

The beauty of search engines are that people (your potential customers) can find long-tail niche services, products, and information quickly. They want relevant, precise, concise, results in their search results. They don't want to waste their time. So don't waste their time by giving them lousy landing pages!

Your paid ad content and landing page should reflect the same level of precision as the prospect's search. To keep the implicit promise given in your ad content for user relevancy (which is why your ad was clicked), a landing page should be relevant and targeted.

The problem with Homepage as Landing Page:

Using your homepage for a landing page will usually frustrate and vex most paid search visitors. Homepages carry a lot of general information, navigation options, and branding. If someone wants to learn more about your company, then using the homepage as a landing page is fine.

But if someone wants to learn more about a niche techno-widget, for example, that your company sells for determining the ultra-trace analysis of stray protons in parabolic hydrocarbons, then your landing page had better focus on your techno-widget! The less clicks needed to find your product or service the better.

Don't make your landing page visitor work too much to find what they are seeking. You'll lose many of them before they get to the 'money page'. Make it easy for them by landing right on the page which appears to be the most precise and relevant.

By the way, having such an focused long-tail webpage will also work wonders for your organic search engine optimization. Building targeted landing pages for Paid Search can help you win at both paid and organic search rankings and lead generation.

Learn more about Google Adwords and Paid Search:

• Lessons Learned from Ten Years with Google Adwords
• Negative is Positive with Google Adwords

Revive Stagnant Paid Search Campaigns: Brian Geddes @ SMX West 2014

Brad Geddes is one of the acknowledged experts in paid search marketing. I've had the pleasure, and the competitive advantage, of taking his Google Adwords classes in the past. Brad Geddes's presentation "Breathing New Life Into A Tired Paid Search Campaign" at SMX West 2014 is worth a serious look and review, especially for those of us who have been running Adwords campaigns for years. In my case, for over 11 years. Paid Search is too effective for lead generation to be taken for granted, or allowed to wallow on extended auto-pilot mode!

Breathing New Life Into A Tired Paid Search Campaign from Search Marketing Expo - SMX

Paid Search Engine Marketing Organization Tips

With Paid Search Marketing Structure, it is always a good idea to Start at the Top.

If you want to start using Adwords and BING Ads, and are new to paid search marketing, take the high Earth orbital view first, and focus on the big picture. Also called PPC or pay-per-click, here are some useful paid search pointers I recommend you follow before you launch any new paid search campaign.

Paid Search Campaign Structure: 

How should the strategic campaign structure of your account be organized? Allow for future growth and diversification of large and niche campaigns as your targeting and  business grows. Name your campaigns logically, and related them to the target market, service or product. Logical organization of your campaigns will save confusion and frustration later on as you expand your paid search marketing efforts.

Think of your campaign structure as you would planning the future growth of a potentially large city, think about the big-scale organization first. Then drill-down to get the major 'neighborhoods' right. Only then should you be worried about where to put the 'streets' and 'parks'.

Once you have a good strategic understanding of how you want to organize your campaigns, determining sub-categories are next. In Google, these are called Adword Groups.

Adword Group Structure:

Adword groups are the actual niche mini-campaigns which reside in each of your higher-level Campaigns. These should be very focused. It is in the Adword group where you need to think carefully about:

Keywords - What keyword phrases do you want to trigger your ads. Are they sufficiently targeted using long-tail tactics to avoid wasted clicks or hyper-competitive search terms of only partial value to you? Do the keywords you've chosen for an Adword Group make sense together, or are they too broad? Can they be split into two more focused Groups?

Negative Keywords - What (single) keywords do you NOT want to trigger your ads? Negative search terms are extremely useful to help improve focus, lower costs, improve click-through-rates, and raise conversion rates.

Ad Content - What will the Ad say? Is it relevant to the market and keywords you have targeted? Are you running alternate ads to measure relative success? Avoid one-size-fits-all approaches.

Landing Pages - Your landing webpage must be absolutely targeted and customized to the intended audience and market niche. Don't send people to your homepage or some higher level webpage, you'll only frustrate your visitors and risk a low quality score from Google, resulting in lower click-through and conversion rates.

There are more factors to consider…. a lot more. But by getting these four fundamental paid search management principles well-designed and optimized in the beginning, the other many paid search tasks and factors needed for success become easier to manage and optimize.

Paid Search, (Google Adwords, BING Ads) run in a parallel universe to organic search engine marketing. I've been successfully and efficiently managing paid search campaigns for over 10 years now, with Adwords as my paid search top priority.