Matching Keywords to Landing Pages for PPC Pay Off

Like every other aspect of Internet marketing, the management of pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns has come a long way in the past five years. You can no longer expect to develop a simple set of keywords, design one ad for all of them and point the campaign toward your site's home page. You have to manage these campaigns to be sure they are paying off, and this requires research and constant nurturing.

Assuming you have the basics covered on your website, PPC campaigns require you to learn three new skills — how to choose the right keywords, how to develop ads for those keywords and how to make landing pages for those keywords. A fourth skill, managing bidding, is also necessary, but is outside the scope of this article, so we will focus on the first three tasks, with special attention paid to the relationship of keywords and landing pages, an aspect that is often overlooked by e-tailers.

Choosing keywords is fairly simple. There are many good tools such as WordTracker to help you choose your keywords, but unfortunately, your competition knows about them too. Chances are the keywords you choose will also be ones your competition wants to employ, so strive to build as large a list as possible. The lesser-searched keywords are likely to be better bargains and can collectively generate significant traffic. Focus on two- and three-word phrases — these keywords tend to give you insight into your potential customers that you can use to your advantage because the terms are more specific.

Buddy System: Categorize Keywords and Assign Landing Pages
Once you have a list of keywords, you need to put them into groups. Each group needs to have a specific ad and landing page assigned to them. Each product you sell will likely have multiple groups based on what the consumer is looking for. For example, if you sell vitamin C, you might have a group for keyword phrases such as "buy Vitamin C cheap" and "Vitamin C best price." You might also have separate groups for customers looking for the "best Vitamin C," "Vitamin C information" and the "benefits of Vitamin C."

The reason you need to group keywords this way is so that you can create specific ads and landing pages based on the mindset of your potential customers. Consumers looking for "low-cost Vitamin C" have a very different sensibility compared to those looking for the "benefits of Vitamin C."

The ad text you write is also very important. Here are a few tips:

Avoid clichés such as "great customer service" and "quality products." It is naïve to think that these kinds of terms are going to resonate with today's sophisticated shopper.
Consider putting your price in the ad text. If you have the best price, it will attract price-sensitive customers. If your price is too high for bargain hunters, you will actually avoid having to pay for clicks from customers who would not buy anyway.
Consider putting your toll-free number in the ad text. This decreases the number of customer actions needed to make a sale, and you might be surprised how many people will call without even visiting your site.
Use the exact keyword phrases in the ad text. AdWords is actually bolding the search text that appears in the ads at the moment, which should increase click-through rates.
Write text that keeps the wrong demographic from clicking on your ad. Paying for the wrong visitors is expensive. For instance, you might use the text "Buy Vitamin C" rather than just "Vitamin C" to keep non-shopping customers from clicking on your ad.
Test, test and test some more. Compare click-through rates between ads, but the more important metric is the customer acquisition rate. A lower click-through rate on the ad might easily be offset by a higher conversion rate on the site.

Safe Landing: Match your Message and Customer Mindset
As you can imagine, landing pages should match the message of your ad and should also correlate to the mindset of the customer. Before I start discussing how to do this, I want to mention a study from Marketing Experiments that identified six factors that affect the effectiveness of landing pages. They are as follows:

Friction — how much work the visitor has to do at your site to find the information and make a purchase.
Incentives — extras that are thrown in to sweeten the deal.
Visitor motivation — how much they want what you have.
Value proposition — the perception visitors have of you and what you are selling.
Anxiety — the perceived risk to the visitor.
Credibility —how well you convey trustworthiness.

It is important to write landing pages with these factors in mind in relation to your shoppers. For example, if you identify a price sensitive visitor (based on his or her keyword search), you should provide less information to reduce friction. You should also focus on the value proposition, and perhaps offer an incentive.

On the other hand, if a visitor is coming from a keyword search that indicates he or she is interested in quality, you should have more content, emphasize your credibility and focus on reducing their risk (perhaps by emphasizing your return policy).

Yes, this is a lot of work, but for most sites, it is one of the top three methods for acquiring traffic. I would recommend that you dedicate some part of each day to managing your PPC campaign. There are tools to automate bidding, but your efforts should largely be spent on improving the customer acquisition costs through optimizing ad text and landing pages.

Having launched two multi-million-dollar online companies, Greg Howlett has been working in the trenches of Internet marketing for more than eight years, and currently is the President/CEO of Vitabase. He is also a regular contributor to ECommerce-Guide.com.

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