Generate UK – Digital Marketing Blog

Before reading this post, we recommend that you get Generate UK – Digital Marketing Blog delivered directly to your email inbox

We’re having a pay per click week this week on the Generate UK blog. Feel free to look back on our previous posts about the importance of landing pages and the Beauty and the Beast of PPC. This post is about providing further details about optimising your campaign and where your thoughts should be in order to get the biggest bang for your buck.

In our opinion, the first thing that your visitor should see after they click your ad and go through to your landing page is the keyword or phrase they used. It’s well documented that your page should have a title for SEO and usability reasons, however from a PPC perspective it is a little more important because you have paid for that visitor to be there. So whatever it was that they were searching for and whatever it was that encouraged them to click your ad, you have to make sure that your landing page delivers this.

So let’s think about the heading. The easiest way to do this would be to use an example and walk through the process. Let’s use a driving instructor business for our example, obviously they offer driving lessons as part of their service. Upon completion of their keyword research and analysis, they quickly understand that locality is important to show their ads at the right time. After all, it would be a waste of money if a driving instructor from Cornwall was showing up in searches for “Driving lessons Glasgow”.

In our example, the heading should include the words driving lessons and the locality. Let’s be as specific as possible and assume our driving instructor is based in Winchester. Let’s also assume that our friendly driving instructor has a special incentive for people to click his ads. Our page title or header now becomes -

Driving Lessons in Winchester – First lesson Free

You can change the details of the offer to whatever suits you or your market. The point is that you should think about something compelling to keep your visitor on the page. If they clicked your ad and it only had “Driving Lessons”, our experience tells us that this will not be as successful a campaign as if it was ran with the headline above.

The next step is general marketing, make the offer time dependent. How do you encourage your visitor to act as quickly as possible? You could also mention that the offer is subject to space, so they need to act quickly to secure a spot.

As part of the page copy, you should include your main keyword phrase (”driving lessons Winchester”). Winchester is a big place, so you might want to consider doing the same exercise for smaller suburbs and villages that surround Winchester that you’re happy to service.

Think about what the action is on your landing page, for our driving instructor the ultimate goal is to increase his driving lesson bookings. This objective is made up of smaller goals, if people are clicking his ad then they’re interested in driving lessons in Winchester, right? So how else can they be leveraged once they are there? In this example, the instructor offered vouchers via the site as he knew that parents were often searching on behalf of their children. He also had an incentive for his visitors to sign up and receive a paper about study tips for the theory test and free mock tests.

In summary, your landing page should be as sticky as you can possibly make it, without it looking like spam. You should be relevant to the search term that you’re optimising for and provide a solution or a service that offers a benefit to your visitor. During your planning process, be conscious of the fact that you’re paying for these visitors, so give yourself every advantage to get the most from each click.

We always welcome your feedback and thoughts, please feel free to comment via the comments section below. Or you can find our details on the Contact Generate UK page.