Blog

There is something very seductive about Google Adwords.

A major money-maker for the Internet giant, Adwords allows even the smallest businesses to place small text ads on their search engine pages.

What’s most appealing is pay per click – where you only pay when someone clicks on your ad.  And depending on your industry and your competition, you could pay as little as 5 or 10 cents per click.

It’s a pretty simple business concept that has since been copied by Bing and Yahoo.

In truth, there’s a lot to know about Google Adwords if you want to take full advantage of this service. There’s keyword research, ad testing and bid strategy that, if done right, can dramatically improve your performance.

But most people choose to go it alone. And Google’s new service, Google Express, has made things a lot easier for the layman.

But there’s another piece to the puzzle

Even if you have Google Adwords pretty well in hand, there’s another piece of the puzzle that can make or break your campaign – and unfortunately, often gets very little attention.

It’s the landing page. The landing page is the destination page where people are taken after they click on your ad.

For many people, this is the website home page. For others, it may be a service or product page that is directly related to the ad that was running.

Neither of these destinations is optimal.  Remember, your destination page should have two goals:

1. It should deliver the information that was promised.
2. It should capture the contact info of the visitor.

If you are using your home page, chances are your visitors are not getting that focused message they expected when they clicked. You are forcing them to navigate their way through your website to find the information.

If you are using a service or product page, you may be giving visitors the information they sought, but in all likelihood, those pages have not been configured for lead capture. In order for those clicks to become leads, you will need them to give up their contact information.

The dedicated landing page

To accomplish both goals, the best solution is the dedicated landing page.

A dedicated landing page can focus on the product or service being promoted – often with much more specificity than a normal service or product page. In fact, you can match the language of your landing page with language used in your ad.

(Google actually rewards you with higher placements if your landing page fulfills the promise of your ad.)

A dedicated landing page will also include a form and an incentive (a free report or a coupon) to get visitors to turn over their contact information.

If you don’t have a form, your visitors will leave and you won’t know who they are. You won’t have any way to reach them again. Even those visitors who spend a lot of time on your website (and are presumably interested in what you offer) will remain unknown to you.

If summary, you will have paid for your clicks but you will have nothing to show for it.

Multiple landing pages

Creating a dedicated landing page is certainly more work than just sending people to your existing web pages.  But it’s worth it.

It’s also worth creating unique landing pages for each of the ads you run – which puts even more demands on your web people.

The only way to make this process workable is to be able to create landing pages on your own.

We can help you with that.  We can set up a landing page template on a user-edited WordPress site that will allow you to create your own landing pages in just seconds.  Okay, maybe minutes.

If this interests you, call me and let’s discuss how to make this work for you.

**********************

This article may be republished at any time as long as it includes the full bio and associated links below.

Bob McCarthy is a marketing consultant specializing in helping companies with lead generation and lead nurturing.  He has two reports you can download:  Step by Step Lead Generation and Lead Nurturing and Making Snail Mail Work – 13 Lessons in Direct Mail Strategy.

About Bob McCarthy

Bob McCarthy is a direct response consultant and copywriter with a focus on direct mail, email and digital marketing. Bob works with B2B, B2C and Non-Profit clients. You can download his free ebook, "Making Snail Mail Work: 13 Lessons in Direct Mail Strategy."