Don’t Waste Your Time with PPC without a Landing Page to Match

Don’t Waste Your Time with PPC without a Landing Page to Match

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I often find myself wondering, “Is this worth the money?” But “Is this worth the money?” isn’t really the question I should be asking myself. You see, the same item can be quite valuable or near worthless depending on the situation, or, perhaps more relevantly, how I plan to use it. Would I pay £10  for a bottle of water? If I was planning on using it as an addition to my morning bath, probably not. (Why yes, I do enjoy a morning bath – what of it?) On the other hand, if I was dying of thirst (and didn’t have the option of drinking from my usual sunrise bathing session) I’m sure I’d gladly pay that price. That said, I think a better question that I should be consistently asking myself is, “Am I going to be using this purchase to its maximum potential?”

Pay Per Click ads, or PPC ads, are a commodity that, much like Botox, you should think hard about before shelling out your cash. Just as a quick explanation, PPC ads work like this: you bid a small amount of money, say £1.00, to have Google place an ad with a sponsored link on their top-ranking search results pages when someone searches for relevant keywords. Wait – it gets better! You don’t pay a thing until someone actually clicks on of these ads, meaning you’re guaranteeing yourself traffic. Of course, the flip side of this is that if you have five thousand people click your ad the original £1 you bid could easily turn into a bill for £5000!

So are PPC ads something worth spending on? Yes, but only if you’re getting conversions out of your web traffic. While having ten thousand visitors a day might provide you with great graphs (and who doesn’t love a good graph?), if none of them are buying your services then your money spent on PPC ads will have gone to waste. So what’s the best way to reel in these finicky customers? No, not fish hooks – that’s inhumane. I’m talking, of course, about high-quality landing pages.

A PPC ad that works, and works well, will link directly to a landing page for your product or service. There are a few important things to take note of here, though – this landing page needs be the bread to your PPC ad’s butter, the Bonnie to its Clyde, if you will. Besides wearing corresponding socks, your PPC ad and your landing page need to have matching products, matching concepts, and even matching text. Okay, maybe not the sock part. But everything else is really important to keep your potential customers’ attention and to make the process from “ad click” to “purchase” silky smooth. Think about this in a real world scenario – if you saw an ad for a juicy burger outside a shop, then walked inside and they were selling sandals, wouldn’t you be a little thrown off? Since it’s probably unlikely (I hope) that you would gulp down summer footwear, it’s equally unlikely that your PPC ad “clickees” are going to purchase a product different than the one they thought they were getting.

Long story short, PPC ads are really only worth it if you’ve got a landing page to back them up. It’s as they say – “Behind every great PPC ad is a great landing page”. Or something like that.