Many companies using Internet marketing strategies out there drive most of the traffic to their home page or possibly another internal page of their website. The optimization of any online marketing campaign should focus on both the traffic drivers as well as where the traffic is sent. This is especially true when using search engine marketing strategies like Pay Per Click advertising in any search engine.
It is now crucial to use a landing page for PPC advertising in Google because it wll have a direct impact on your Google Quality Score and conversion success. The idea of consversion optimization is pretty simple but the purpose should be understood in order to execute it correctly for your webpages. The main idea of course is to always be improving your ROI. There is no point in spending tons of money in online or offline marketing if you are just planning to drive traffic to your home page (unless of course your home pages acts as a well optimized “landing page”).
Here is an example. JetSelect Aviation (a premier private jet charter service) has performed various form of marketing (online and offline), including Yahoo PPC. All the traffic was being channeled to their home page and results had been fairly dismal. They were recieving about one or two leads a month. Here is an example of the home page:
Once the marketing campaign started, aggressive Googe PPC was added and four landing pages created. The ad copy for the ads was written according to their direct business goals. It is important to understand Google Quality Score guidelines in order to properly optimize your PPC campaign for the best possible results. Here is an example of one of the landing pages created. Notice the update in design, graphics, clear calls to action, simple booking engine right at the top of the page, and simple information (there is more content below the fold).
Landing pages can really be as simple or content heavy as you want (in my opinion). What matters really is what is above the fold and how the call to action is designed. Of course, this all depends on your conversion goals and what you plan to obtain from your landing pages. Those goals should be defined first before designing the page or launching any marketing.
The initial result of the properly optimized PPC campaigns and well designed landing pages was going from one or two poor quality leads per month to five to eight high quality leads per day. The results will of course vary depending on your business, industry, and specific goals.
Either way, you must use landing pages with great content ands clear calls to action in order to get the most bang for your buck from your Internet marketing strategies.