Posts Tagged ‘Landing page’

Imagine you’ve walked into a department store and said to a member of staff near the door that you want to buy a duvet cover. Instead of giving you directions to the second floor where the bedding department is, they send you off to the fourth floor where the electrical goods are. That would be quite irritating and would reduce the chances of you buying the bed linen that you came into the shop for.

And what has this got to do with AdWords?

Well, if you are sending potential customers to your website you need to make life as easy as possible for them. You need to help them find what they’re looking for as quickly as possible. You certainly don’t want to end up annoying them by sending them to the wrong “department” on your site.

In other words, once you have convinced someone to click on your AdWords ad, you have to make sure you send them to the most appropriate landing page on your website. That way, they’ll immediately find what they are looking for and that increases the chances that they will buy from you or contact you instead of clicking the dreaded Back button and going to one of your competitors instead.

Most of the time, sending people to the correct landing page is not hard to do. The potential customer has usually given you a very good idea of what they are looking for by virtue of the search phrase they entered into Google in the first place. So all you then need to do is set the destination URL for your AdWords ad so as it sends people to the most relevant page of your website based on what they searched for on Google.

Doing this will mean you get more sales or enquiries and will also reduce your costs because the relevance of your landing page is one of the things that helps increase your AdWords Quality Score.

Related articles

• Google Quality Score Update (epiphanysolutions.co.uk)

I was introduced to a great website last week. It’s called Which Test Won and it really makes clear the importance of split testing.

What is split testing? Well, for every piece of marketing you do – whether it’s writing an advert or a direct sales letter, designing a website, running an AdWords campaign, or anything else – there will always be more than one way of wording or presenting your message. And without testing, you won’t know for sure which way is best.

With split testing you come up with two versions of your website landing page, sales letter, advert or whatever it is you are using, and then you put version A in front of one group of potential customers and version B in front of the other group and you see which generates the best response in terms of sales, enquiries, etc.

The beauty of online marketing is that it is actually pretty simple to carry out split testing and to measure what results you get. So even if you have a website which you think is working well, or an AdWords campaign that is generating you a healthy return on investment, it is still worth experimenting to see if some subtle changes could bring you even better results. Sometimes, for example, just changing the colour of a Buy Now button can have a dramatic impact on your number of online sales.

If you don’t believe me, you should definitely check out Which Test Won. It has loads of real life examples of split tests that have been carried out. You can play along by trying to guess which of the two different versions of each item of marketing material was most successful and then find out what way other people voted and which version was actually the winner in real life testing.

How much split testing are you doing in your business? Has carrying out this kind of regular experimenting and testing made a difference to how much business you get from the web? We’d love to hear your stories – just use the comments box below to tell us.

This is one of the main reasons people give us when we ask them why they’re not using Google Adwords, and in many cases they’ve not even given it a go!

It is true to say that if you read all the negative things said about pay per click advertising, then the fact that it can be expensive rates as the number one complaint, especially if you’re in a competitive industry.

But it doesn’t have to be!

Managed well, an Adwords campaign can achieve what you want or need, on the budget you have. And that’s the great thing – as long as you do your research beforehand and choose the right keyphrases and targets, Adwords can perform on pretty much any budget.

Of course, the bigger the budget the greater the results, but don’t let that put you off. Well written ads and great landing pages, combined with some proper keyphrase research and an analysis of your market can result in some quick wins for those of us with the smallest budgets.

Choose keyphrases that are more targeted and focused, rather than generic, and make sure your landing pages are optimised properly, and before you know it you could be doubling, tripling, or quadrupling your investment!

Not sure how much you should be putting into an Adwords campaign? Drop us a line and we’ll be happy to advise!

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photo credit: Dottie Mae