Whether you advertise on Google, Bing or Yahoo, landing pages will play an integral role in the success of your pay-per-click (PPC) campaign. Most marketers redirect their paid traffic to a dedicated landing page, but a staggering 44% still opt to send traffic to their business’s home page. Although it is possible to run a successful PPC campaign this way, landing pages have proven to be more effective and can greatly improve conversion rates for sales, sign-ups, and subscriptions.

Why Landing Pages Are Super Effective

Landing pages are one-page iterations of your website built with a singular goal or purpose in mind. These heavily focused pages are optimized to deliver very specific results, like increasing sales for a top-selling item or collecting email addresses for a weekly newsletter. Landing pages set the stage for marketers to generate content that will persuade users to act on a specific call-to-action and ultimately result in a conversion.

Search Query Relevance

When users perform a search, they look for pages containing products, services or content they deem relevant to their search. The more relevant a page is to the user’s search query, the more likely the user is to engage with the site and convert a sale. With this knowledge, marketers can design landing pages – sometimes more than one for each ad group in their PPC campaign – where they can redirect traffic to and increase search relevance.

Example: If you run an electronics business and your short-term goal is to drive sales for a specific product – say, an Apple iPad Mini 4, for example – you can design a heavily-focused landing page to serve that singular purpose. By showcasing the product’s newest features and noting its advantages over similar products, you can more easily persuade users to buy the iPad Mini 4.

Sending users to the homepage of your site may work as well, but you will notice that the lack of focus will ultimately result in lower conversion rates. Sending a user who searched for “iPad Mini 4” to your homepage – which contains information on desktop computers, laptops, printers and other unrelated items – will not deliver the results you want. A user who searches specifically for “iPad Mini 4” already knows what he or she wants and is looking for a final push to reinforce their decision to buy; therefore, it would be best to redirect this user to a landing page that is geared towards selling that particular item.

Conversion and Campaign Tracking

By redirecting traffic to several landing pages, marketers can track the effectiveness of each page and make changes to the design, forms or call-to-actions to increase conversions. After collecting enough data, marketers can identify top-performing landing pages and leverage them to maximize conversion potential. Marketers should perform A/B and multivariate testing on a regular basis to get the most out of their PPC campaigns.

Why You Must Adapt To A Changing Environment

Times change, and so do marketing tactics. In the early 2000’s, a simple contact form and some text may have been enough to convert a sale, but now it may just leave a bad impression in the reader’s mind. Changes in consumer preferences will undoubtedly impact the effectiveness of your landing pages, so make sure you are aware of consumer trends and be ready to change with your environment.

It is also important that you do not blindly endorse marketing tactics based on others’ experiences. Test everything yourself and see if you notice an increase in conversions before adopting new landing page layouts or strategies.

If you want to design effective landing pages and improve your PPC performance but don’t know where to start, speak to a marketing professional today.