Creating landing pages: How to run an AdWords campaign

In this mini-series, I will be talking about running a Google AdWords campaign. I will cover quite a bit of detail about keyword research, writing ad text, creating landing pages, maintaining your campaign, and reporting and metrics.

Your landing page is a crucial part of getting customers to take action after clicking on one of your AdWords ads. There’s a good chance that they didn’t read too much of your ad, so a lot of your persuasion needs to take place on your landing page. And you didn’t really have much space to get your message across in a ridiculously short text ad, did you?

Why a landing page?

In the early days of AdWords advertising, a lot of companies were advertising for specific products and then pointing the ad to their company home page. This leads to poor results.

If a searcher clicks on an ad for Product X, then they expect to land on a web page that talks about Product X. Hey, you’re paying money for this specific segment of traffic, so you better give them what they want!

What a good landing page looks like

Well, the optimal landing page for your campaign is probably going to look different for almost every type of situation that you encounter. And unfortunately, you don’t know what a good landing page is until you try something.

The best thing that you can do is start with something simple. Create a landing page that offers only one action, be it selling one product or signing up for one thing like a newsletter. Don’t try distracting the user with too many different options. It should be clear to them what your page is about upon first glance.

Sometimes your product or service page will be good enough to be a landing page. Sometimes you’ll need to create separate landing pages for each ad group that you find keywords for. Sometimes a single landing page for your campaign will work just fine.

The point is that you’re probably not going to do so well right out the gate.

13 tips for writing the ultimate landing page

Copyblogger has a great article about writing the ultimate landing page. To sum it up, here are the 13 tips (they had bonus tips) that they listed:

1. Make sure your headline refers directly to the place from which your visitor came or the ad copy that drove the click.
2. Provide a clear call to action.
3. Write in the second person – You and Your.
4. Write to deliver a clear, persuasive message, not to showcase your creativity or ability to turn a clever phrase.
5. You can write long copy as long as it’s tight.
6. Be crystal clear in your goals.
7. Keep your most important points at the beginning of paragraphs and bullets.
8. In line with #7, people read beginnings and ends before they read middles.
9. Make your first paragraph short, no more than 1-2 lines
10. Write to the screen.
11. Remove all extraneous matter from your landing page.
12. Don’t ask for what you don’t need.
13. Assume nothing. Test everything.

It all comes down to tying the experience back to the ad that referred the visitor. This is why you may need to create separate landing pages for each of your ad groups in your campaign. You may need to tell a separate story for each of your groups of related keywords.

For example, if you were advertising on cheap toilets, then you probably wouldn’t want to offer up your most expensive toilet. For expensive toilets, create a different landing page that offers one of your higher-priced items.

Experiments and A/B or multivariate testing

If this is your first shot at paid search, the best thing that you can do is to create a couple different versions of your landing page. This is referred to as an A/B test. Then all you need to do is create 2 identical Ad Texts in AdWords, except point the Destination URL for each to your 2 different landing pages. Let it run for about a week and see which landing page is yielding better results.

There are just so many things that you can experiment with that you just need to jump in. Try testing the effects of these elements:

• Presence or absence of navigation
• Offering a special deal (if sales are your goal)
• Adding sub-offers for those who may not be interested in your primary offer
• Positioning of graphics and buttons
• Length/detail of copy
• Different headlines

The main point is to only test one variable at a time. If you want to see if having navigation on the page affects results, create 2 landing pages:

1. One with navigation
2. One without navigation

If you try changing too many different things at once in a simple A/B test, you won’t know which page elements in particular caused a change in performance.

Tools like Google Website Optimizer can also help you test many variables at once. If you’re testing more than 1 variable, then it’s called multivariate testing.

Keep in mind that the more variables that you want to test, the longer that you’ll need to run the test in order to get more meaningful data.

This is part of a mini-series

Read the rest of Mini-series: How to run an AdWords campaign.