Some PPC experts seem obsessed with landing pages. As far as they are concerned, your PPC traffic should be driven to a completely separate set of entry pages, only touching your actual site if they don't find what they want on them. Surely a well optimised site targeting the correct keywords would be just as efficient, and cheaper to produce and manage?
Thoughts?
Posted by: Gifford Morley-Fletcher on 30 March 2011
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I'd say it depends on how
Posted by Stephen Mills on 31 March 2011
I'd say it depends on how "specific" your PPC is. If it is to generate a call to action for a very specific product or service, you may not want to redesign your whole website for that product or risk click throughs getting lost on a webpage with more than one offering. So you'd probably want to make sure you have a landing page. Especially as a landing page is often the best way to start data capture. If it's for a general "look at me" then don't see why you'd need a landing page. Whether you should be doing PPC for those sort of campaigns, is another question!
We use a mixture of landing
Posted by Jane Wade on 8 April 2011
We use a mixture of landing pages and specific entry points into our website. We generate around 60% of our leads this way and feel that is the optimum balance to ensure enough conversions each month. So for us no, we don't generate landing pages for each advert / campaign.
The short answer is no -- you
Posted by richard.robinson on 8 April 2011
The short answer is no -- you do not need separate landing pages for your PPC traffic, provided that your website is already well structured and it allows you to direct traffic to relevant pages with good product/service descriptions and clear calls-to-action.
There are some instances where separate PPC landing pages are useful. The key reason you might want them is for testing purposes: you might want to use distinct landing pages to test new designs, different calls-to-action, etc, without risking the effect on your overall traffic. Any positive learnings can then be incorporated in your main site to improve performance across all channels.
Second, some B2B advertisers will use distinct PPC landing pages for attribution purposes:
for example, an advertiser might use a dedicated PPC landing page to drop a cookie on visitors who have come from paid search, and then subsequently always show those visitors a different phone number for reaching the telesales team, in order to track leads and sales across channels.
But there is no point in duplicating and separating landing pages for PPC unless they are going to be used to do something differently -- with testing or attribution, for example. Nobody’s resources are unlimited, so it is usually of greater benefit to focus on improving rather than duplicating your site.
