Are You Paying Enough Attention to Your PPC Landing Page?

Most of the tips you’ll find for successful pay per click advertising will focus on things related to keyword selection.  If you’re targeting the right keywords in the right way, they say, you’ll start getting the kind of results you want from your PPC efforts.  Some will give you a few recommendations about the actual writing of your ads, too.  A prperly written ad can, after all, improve your CTR and resutls.

One thing that’s often overlooked, however, may be the most critical aspect of effective PPC campaign management.  And has nothing to do with adjustments you can make within your Adwords account.  It’s not about how you’re getting traffic, it’s about where you’re sending it.

If you aren’t thinking about your landing page as much as you’re thinking about your keyword selection, you’re making a big mistake.  

The quality of your landing page is going to be the prime determinor of your profits, obviously.  If you’re landing page is a dud that doesn’t produce conversions, all of the successfully gathered traffic in the world isn’t going to save you.

But it goes deeper than that.  The quality of your landing page is also going to have a massive inmpact on the price you’re paying for ad clicks.  Google assesses keyword pricing based, in large part, on your landing page quality score.  Thus, even a “perfect” campaign in terms of ad structure and keyword bidding may be wildly overpriced simply because you’re landing page doesn’t meet Google’s expectations (which, by the way, appear to be inching higher and higher with each passing day).

Pay close attention to your keywords.  Right your ads the right way.  But don’t forget where all of that purchased traffic is going after the ads are clikced.  The quality and ability of your landing page to produce conversions must always be at the forefront of your planning.