Not too long ago, I went to a marketing event put on by our local Boulder Marketing Group, and chatted with a woman about her company’s web site and pay-per-click campaign. This is a company that sells courses for professionals in the food industry. She was telling me how much they were spending (a lot!) on their PPC’s to get clicks to one particular program they offer, but they weren’t getting many leads interested in the program. She didn’t understand why.

What’s wrong with this PPC campaign?

Though they seemed to have the right keywords, their follow-through just wasn’t there, and with PPC, you need follow-through. Click-throughs were going to their home page, and not directly to information about this specific program advertised. So, once at the home page, visitors had to search around for the advertised program. How likely is it they will spend the time to do that? Not likely.

How can they fix their PPC campaign?

What would work best is to create a specific landing page for the PPC, which would track directly to that particular campaign. That would make it easy to track ROI for the PPC campaign. If they don’t want to spend the time or money to create a landing page, at a minimum, the click-though ought to go to the program page, as long as there is a way for the site visitor to request more information on that page.

The problem with the second approach? The program page is bound to just lead the site visitor elsewhere because of the site navigation. Then you lose that lead. Landing pages just work better in targeted marketing, such as PPC, because you get the user to immediately act on their impulse.

I know that corporate marketers can find it to be a big hassle to get landing pages created, because inevitably, they have to work with IT or their outside agency to get them done. That equals delays or too much money. But, there are tools out there to create branded landing pages on-the-fly. SurveyGizmo is the best one I have seen. An online survey system, this great little application is easy enough to use that you can just bypass IT altogether and test PPC campaigns easily.

3 basic best practices for PPC

1. Use for specific campaigns that you need or want a specific result. Examples: lead generation, download white paper, sign up for more info, get a discount if you buy now (or soon).
2. Landing pages should be simple: no navigation, not a lot of graphics to distract from the purpose. Save the amazing graphic design for some other purpose.
3. Repeat the heading text from the PPC ad on the landing page. Let clickers know they are at the right place so they trust what happens next.