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Today’s article

In the process of creating a PPC campaign, search engine marketers have to point their ads to pages that give more detailed information related to the ad. The simplest solution is using the existing pages of a site. This idea is often far from ideal because it doesn’t guarantee two things: great visitor experience (and the landing page efficiency that results from it) and high Google AdWords quality score.  So, there are a few reasons why creating special landing pages for PPC campaigns should be considered seriously.

• A specially created page is much easier to optimize for a higher Google AdWords quality score.
• The A/B split testing of a landing page is easier if you are free from your site’s template.
• You can get rid of all elements that might reduce the landing page’s efficiency.
• You can go on testing until you find a successful combination of text and page layout that converts visitors into buyers best of all.

The result of your marketing and design endeavor should be a landing page with the following characteristics.

1. The landing page is very relevant to the ad and it gives valuable and unique information to visitors.A word-by-word reproduction of your ad on the landing page would seem redundant to visitors and its not really necessary from the AdWords quality score perspective. At the same time, repeating the ad’s main keyword is a good idea, because it connects the ad and the landing page in the mind of a visitor.Keeping your landing page up to high-quality website standards is important for your visitors and for obtaining a high quality score. Google recommends that “advertisers bear in mind the three main components of a high-quality website: relevant and original content, transparency, and navigability”, which is equally true for landing page quality.
2. The copy is brief, clear, scannable, and includes a prominent call to action, i.e. all of the information necessary for a visitor to complete your targeted action.Use straightforward and keyword-rich headings so that a visitor can quickly understand your proposition; minimize descriptions to give just the most important and convincing facts and details. Find a good balance between “meat” and brevity in your copy, and make the targeted visitor’s exit from the page the most logical step for her while being the most desirable step for you.Additionally, in accordance with Google’s “navigability” criterion, you should point the visitor to the page where she can receive enough information to make a decision if your landing page has not been persuasive enough. However, providing a number of navigation options may result in a lower conversion rate.
3. The page is credible and contains details that will make your potential buyers feel safe to buy.According to the “transparency” principle, your visitors should easily find information helping them to clearly understand the consequences of their transactions with your company. Details that identify you as a reliable vendor are smart elements of your landing page.
4. The landing page loads fast and complies with other Google AdWords Criteria for a high quality landing page.To define if your landing page is slow, Google compares it to the threshold. The threshold is calculated by adding three seconds to the “regional average”, i.e. the average download time in a specific region or country.The load time is based only on HTML downloading; neither images, nor video content are included. The quality score may be penalized if the load time of your landing page goes above the threshold. Read Google’s recommendations on how to improve the load time.

Web CEO Metrics

Here we are sharing the generalized numbers from our HitLens Web Analytics service. It covers 300,000+ websites from all over the world.

This October Google gained even more of a visitor audience – 83%. Yahoo referred 7% of visitors to sites against 9% in October 2009. Bing’s searcher number has increased to 7% of all global searchers as opposed to 6% in October of last year.

Global Search Engines (%)

You can see how visitors are being referred to websites.

In October 2010 visitors queried search engines in 52% of all searches (up 4% compared to October 2009!). Bookmarking and linking shares fluctuate – they have referred 19 and 21% of all visitors correspondingly. The amount of people who clicked on paid advertising has decreased – 6%.

Visitor Referrers (%)