Sending All Clicks to Your Homepage (7 AdWords Mistakes – #3)

7 Common AdWords mistakes that will kill your Quality Score and increase your costs.

Mistake #3 – Sending all Clicks to Your Home Page.

Let’s start this post with a question. What is one of the single most powerful features of search engine marketing? The key to why PPC and SEO work so well?

Quite simply, the user is actively broadcasting their needs and desires to the world every time they search for something.

‘Useful’ is an understatement… The ability for us to promote products and services in the targeted manner that Pay-Per-click allows is incredibly powerful and profitable when done right.

The key (excuse the pun) to being successful is choosing the right keywords in the first place (to be covered in separate posts) which will not only target the users when they’re ready to buy, but also target users when they are at other stages of the buying cycle – research, comparison etc.).

Once you have developed your master keyword list, you then need to break this up in to campaigns & ad groups, write your ad copy and select your targeted landing pages…
This is where many advertisers let themselves down and ultimately pay the price in the long run.

Too many AdWords advertisers will develop a great list of keywords relevant to their business but then make the fatal mistake of then sending all their click traffic to the home page.

This is a bad move.

If you have invested the time into finding the terms that your potential customers will search on, then it is imperative that you invest more time in customising landing pages on your site that will best match the keyword themes you have defined. Eg. If someone searched for ‘blue widgets’, send them to a ‘blue widgets’ page. Don’t send them to a home page that says ‘Welcome, we sell 100’s of widgets and widget accessories in many styles and colors…’

They’ve already sent you a very strong signal that they are interested in ‘blue widgets’, so that’s what you should give them.

Let’s think about it another way. Let’s say you run a brick and mortar retail outlet selling shoes. Sending all traffic to the homepage of your site, regardless of what they searched for would be like answering every customer query about shoe type, size, brand, color in your store with ‘Yes we have shoes, check out our massive range!’ as you stand at the front door…. Helpful? Not really, and chances are many potential customers would walk straight out of your store and try your competition out.

Search marketing is exactly the same. If you don’t match the searchers intent with a relevant lading page, you run a much higher risk of loosing that user completely. They will ‘bounce’ back to the search engine results page and click on a competitor’s link.

Going ‘Back’ is easy for the site visitor to do. Getting ‘that visitor’ back again is expensive.

So the lesson in this is. Send your PPC traffic to relevant landing pages on your site that reinforce the message that you have what they are specifically looking for. If you don’t have a page that suits, but you do have the specific product or service category, build a page that does.

Technically speaking too, the relationship between the landing page you have chosen and the keywords you are bidding on will impact on the Quality Score of your ads. The higher the Quality Score, the less you pay for a given position.

Don’t chase your tail and loose visitors due to poor landing page choice. Give them what they’re after and you’ll be amazed at the results.

Previously:

Mistake #1 – Too many keywords per ad group.

Mistake #2 – Not using negative keywords.

Coming Soon:

Mistake #4 – Not targeting your geographic region.

Mistake #5 – Not monitoring bids at the keyword level.

Mistake #6 – Not using different keyword ‘Match Types’.

Mistake #7 – Not splitting out Campaigns to target Search and Content Network separately.

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