Top 5 PPC Mistakes – #2: Sending All Traffic to Your Home Page

This is the second post in a series of the top 5 mistakes PPC campaign managers make.

Many beginner PPC campaign managers spend so much time and effort on writing good ad text and compiling a strong keyword list that they forget to consider the destination URL that they’re having their ads point to. The best ad in the world will only pull someone into your site. That’s only half the battle. The beauty of the internet is that the consumer is in control. They know that if they don’t find what they’re looking for immediately they can go back to the search results or enter in a new URL in the blink of an eye. Knowing that, a good PPC manager will make sure that their landing page speaks to the user’s search query. If a user searches for “homes for sale in Milwaukee” and is taken to your home page, which talks about real estate in southeast Wisconsin rather than just Milwaukee, it’s very likely that they’ll be frustrated. They’re much more likely to convert (in this case a request for an appointment or a contact form for more information) on a site that provides them with a page directly addressing Milwaukee homes for sale. On top of that, Google has somewhat of a usability enforcement mechanism built into their paid ad algorithm. Since Google has an incentive to provide the searcher with content that’s relevant to their search, it looks at your landing page to make sure that it’s relevant to the keyword that you’re targeting. A quality landing page is just one aspect of the Quality Score, which Google uses to determine your cost per click for each keyword. It’s really a win-win situation; by supplying your website visitors with content relevant to their search, you’re likely to drive up the conversion rate and lower your cost per conversion through higher quality scores.

Up Next: Mistake # 3: Having too Many Keywords in an Adgroup Previous posts in this series: Mistake # 1: Using Keywords that are Too Broad