Google Adwords: The Importance of Using Landing Pages for Your Campaigns

Landing page testingI am pretty sure you’ll agree with me that getting a Google Adwords campaign to be profitable has become harder and harder.

It just seems as if clicks are becoming more expensive and at the same time fewer prospects are converting.

In today’s post, we are looking at the reasons to use landing pages (sales pages) as opposed to pointing the campaigns straight to your homepage. There are some excellent landing page building software tools on the market to help you build high converting landing pages.

We will also take a brief look at what an effective landing page entails.

So let’s get stuck in.

Why shouldn’t you point your Adwords clicks to your home page?

Well, the reason is that the cornerstone of any successful campaign is message matching.

This means that your Google Adwords advert text should match the destination text.

Thus, if I click on your advert and offer I must immediately find that offer and matching text on the destination page.

The problem with a homepage is that it has more than one function.

It represents the company as a whole and has several other links and menu tabs to click on.

This means that the visitor is presented with a plethora of choices.

However, a landing page has no links or menu items to click on.

The only place to click, on the landing page, is your call to action button. In some cases, you may place your company logo in the top left corner as a technique to get visitors to your website.

But, this is not ideal.

The landing page has ONE objective and that is to convert the visitor into either a subscriber, a prospect, a lead, or a sale. That’s it, nothing else. Either they convert or they leave. These are the only options.

Some tech companies have even converted their home page to act as landing pages. This means they immediately go for customer conversion. Some examples are,

Therefore, you can now focus your Adwords campaigns and Facebook campaigns on a specific outcome – the conversion outcome.

However, to achieve this conversion is by no means an easy task.

It requires a very specific implementation of which every step should be carefully planned and executed at a high standard of excellence.

In broad terms, the steps that go into a profitable campaign are:

  1. Goal setting (what do you want to achieve; 100 leads a week, RR25 000 of sales a week…)
  2. Campaign strategy and message planning
  3. Advert design and scripting
  4. Wireframing of your landing page and text plus conversion elements
  5. Call-to-action and objective strategy
  6. Research of buyer personas and keywords
  7. Landing page design and formatting
  8. Conversion copywriting
  9. Media buying (Google Adwords & Facebook etc.)
  10. Testing & optimising of the campaign advert and landing page

And most importantly, handling requests from prospects that completed your call to action form with the utmost urgency.

Try to reach out to them immediately.

If you do not do this part effectively, everything else is a waste of time and money.

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