A Unique Landing Page

A landing page is any page a user is sent to upon clicking on an ad. these pages usually are dedicated specifically to the information in the ad a user clicks on. In many cases, however, they can be actual pages that currently exist on your Web site. There is no official rule that says a landing page must be one or the other. There is, however, a great deal of study put into the success of conversions on dedicated landing pages, and given their high success rate, it's not surprising that most people choose to run unique lading pages with their paid search campaigns. To be clear, you can use any page on your Web site as the location where a paid search ad directs traffic, but using a unique landing page is usually way to go.
Such unique pages exist to serve one purpose only: to get users to buy the product or service you mentioned in the ad they just clicked, so the pages should be designed to speak only of the actual product. These pages are not ones you'd link to in your normal Web site navigation, though, as they are simply a means of converting sales and make sense only when viewed immediately after the paid search ad is clicked. Otherwise, they might seem a bit abrupt or random.

Running a unique landing page to directly match a search campaign gives you the added ability to craft a completely customized sales message for each keyword or group of key words an advertisement targets. In this way you present the user with a very clear and clean pathway to the conversion. If the pages on your Web site are designed in such a way that they contain only the relevant and needed information on a given product or service, then they may well be candidates to serve as landing pages for paid campaigns. Take this thinking one step further and make sure that the data and information shown on these pages drive users into the sales funnel and through to the conversion.

Often, a dedicated landing page is a much simpler version of the standard Web page. Through the systems available at search engines and their platforms, you can run a number of tests with an infinite variety of subtle changes on the page. All this testing is designed to help you understand which version of a page converts the best. The results may differ between products, services, search engines, and keywords. The point here is to use the tools and the information to help you finely tune each landing page to a specific keyword or set of keywords. If this sounds like a lot of work, it usually is. Your best bet is to start small and grow as your experience and revenues increase. Taking this approach will save you a lot of time and headache as you progress toward more expensive keywords. Getting things wrong with a short list of key words and a handful of landing pages is easily managed; getting things wrong with 10,000 keywords and hundreds of landing pages is extremely costly.

Be sure to set up individual campaigns within the search engines' paid advertising systems to better track your results and efforts. These systems are incredibly detailed, and you should use that to your advantage. By setting up individual campaigns, which are then mapped to select advertisements targeting select keywords or phrases, you can quickly drill down to see which areas are performing well and which are lagging behind. This data, coupled with the systems scanning your landing pages, will help you understand where you are losing people in the conversion process, and give you a true picture of where to apply your efforts. This data paints a clear image of exactly how users are interacting with your Web site. You will likely learn that users originating from a paid search will click through fewer pages than those who originate from an organic search. Your goal at this point is to try to fix the conversion process to capture those users and ensure they end up on your well-designed landing pages.