With pay-per-click (ppc) costs rising and the marketplace more competitive than ever, it has become increasingly difficult to stand out from your competitors. Spending time choosing and experimenting with the ideal ad format and keywords is vital, but to make the most of your ppc costs and get the edge on your competitors, you need to focus on your landing pages.

A landing page is a page or group of pages specifically developed to be associated with the keywords in your ppc campaign. These landing pages need to be as specific to the ad as possible.

Relevancy

By asking yourself ‘what does this visitor expect to see’ when they land on your page, you will be able to start building highly effective landing pages. Your landing page need to have as little distraction as possible and allow the user to complete the desired action (i.e, a sale) as easily as possible. When a user clicks on your ad, they are demonstrating that the initial ad was relevant to them, and you need to continue this relevancy onto your landing page.

Consider the following example; A user performs a search on Google for ‘Samsung LCD TV’. Your ad is displayed in the results and does a good job of inciting the user to click on the ad. The user now lands on your landing page and you now need to convince them to carry out the desired action, in this case, buying the television. The user will be expecting to see copy and images relating to the product. Having too much unrelated content on the page could easily put them off.

The headings you use on your landing page are vital. They need to be as closely linked to the title of your ad as possible to have the greatest effect. In our example, our images would clearly show the product in question and we would include a clear and concise call to action. We would also need to include as much assurance as possible to our visitor that we are a credible and reliable supplier. Text such as ‘money back guarantee’ and ‘free delivery’ can be particularly effective.

You also need to remember than relevancy is subjective. Different people landing on your page may regard different elements on the page differently. This is why it is important to experiment and try different combinations and layouts.

Landing Page Design

We will now look at how you should design your landing pages in more detail. Firstly, get a pen and paper and sketch your page out, highlighting the major elements such as your logo and navigation (elements that are normally constant throughout the site). Next, sketch out the details on the landing page such as the title, images, description and buy button. Look at your sketch and imagine yourself landing on this page and ask yourself which elements would attract your attention. Think about where you should add colour and which areas should remain clear. Continue sketching until you think you have achieved the most effective layout. The beauty of sketching pages out like this is that it is so quick and easy and often makes you think of things you may have otherwise overlooked.

Headings

It needs to be immediately obvious to the user that the heading of your page relates closely to your ad. Make sure you include the keyword in the heading. This applies even if the keyword phrase consists of only one word. The best thing you can do to determine the effectiveness of your headings is to do some basic tests. Try two different pages that are identical apart from the headings and see which one converts best. When you are confident that you have determined the page that converts best, do a few more tests until you have the best headings possible. Experiment with the colour, font size and letter spacing, as well as the words in your heading. It is surprising what a small difference can make to the effectiveness of your landing pages.

Images

Generally, you should only use images in the main content of your landing pages if it truly adds relevancy to the page. It is normally best to avoid images that are included purely for aesthetics as they tend to distract the user. However, if you are selling a product, showing images of the product is essential, preferably showing high quality pictures of the product from various angles.

Calls to Action

You should also experiment with your call to action button. If you wanted your visitor to complete an order form for example, you could try using ‘buy now’ rather than ‘submit’. Even better- try to include your keywords in the button text. Depending on your keywords, this can be tricky so only do this if you have a keyword that reads well as the button text. For example ‘Buy Samsung LCD TV’ contains all of our keywords from our previous example but it could be too long and may not convert well. This is where testing would be important. As with your headings, try testing a few different pages concurrently. The results can be surprising.

It is also important that anything that could cause the visitor to change their mind about the transaction during this stage is addressed. Visitors frequently abandon shopping carts and forms at the last minute as they can be unsure about what to expect when they click a button or link. Many people are still very sceptical of the internet so in order to put them at ease, think about how easy and reassuring the process is from beginning to end. The sketches we talked about earlier can help you address this.

Conclusion

By testing your pages and thinking carefully about how your visitors will interact with your page, you will be able to create highly effective landing pages that could give you a significant advantage over your competitors and help you make the most of your ppc campaigns. On the Internet, your competitors are only a click of the mouse away so start developing your landing pages now and make the most of every visitor you get!