Landing page is one of the most important aspects of Pay per click (PPC) marketing on the Google Adwords network. After the initial keyword research and the creation of ad copy, you must have ads that are well targeted, great call to action and relevant to your industry and geotargeted to your target audience.

Each ad group in each of your campaigns must have a corresponding landing page that talks only about the product or service advertised in that specific ad. For exampe, if you are selling blue widgets, your landing page copy must address only blue widgets. This increases the relevancy of the whole process as the user gets to click on the ad of her choice and finds relevant content on the landing page that is in sync with the ad itself.

The landing page plays an important role in reinforcing Google’s mantra of relevancy and targeting which in turn delivers the best search experience to the user. The landing page is one of the important factors that determines the quality score. The higher your quality score, the lesser CPC (cost per click) you end up paying.

There are a few things you can do to improve the effectiveness of your landing page. At the end of the day, you must remember that the most important factor that determines the success of your PPC campaign is the conversion rate. If any casual visitor that lands on your landing page finds the quality and content relevant to the ad she clicked on and finds it very easy to follow the call to action, it ensures the success of your campaign.

The call to action could be buying the product, signing up for a newsletter, downloading a product or registering for a free membership to your site. A heightened conversion rate should be the  ultimate aim of any pay per click campaign. The higher the success rate, you know that your campaign is effective.

This is just the starting point. You can now try other forms of landing pages with a different approach to call to action. Instead of using conventional text, you could have a video on your landing page or a nice clean graphic image with clear call to action. It also depends on the industry your business is in. Testing is the only way to find out the method that works and one that does not.

Some of the important factors that you can take to ensure the effectiveness of your landing page and hence the overall sales funnel are:

1) Limited Options on the Landing Page:
When a user clicks on your ad that sells plasma tv and finds a great description of the features of the tv and its advantages in terms of quality and price compared to other brands, you can then proceeed to place a link to buy the television online at a special price. Your call to action would be Buy this TV now.

Alternatively, being an expensive product, users might be hesitant buying it straight off. So you can get them to sign up to your newsletter then employ email marketing to upsell other products over time. Make sure you just have a name and email address field for signup. Too many fields can put off users. You can also offer a white paper about the cool features your tv offers to advanced users after collecting email address of users.

It is important that you give users a specific call to action on your landing page. Too many offers, variety of graphics, videos all shoved together on the landing page can cause paralysis and distract the user totally. Keep it simple. Ensure that the sales funnel flows smoothly along a predicted channel to achieve your end result.

2) Method of Call to Action:
As mentioned earlier, you can use copy on the landing page with links to appropriate products that you sell online.  You can have a video with a sales spiel and provide a URL at the end of which users can click to take the desired action. You have the option of choosing a great image with a clear call to action. I have inserted a couple of screenshots below of two different advertisers when I search for mobile phone ringtones. The visual approach works well for this industry than text links.

3) Compelling Call to Action:
Irrespective of the method used for your call to action, the actual call to action should be clear and unambiguous. It should be well defined and state specifically what the user should do. Even if you are seeing a good spike in conversions, you must keep tweaking elements on the page to see if you can better it. A famous internet marketer, Mike Filisame has a product called Butterfly Marketing where he explains how even a small change in a headline or change in the words that make up the call to action can transform your conversion rate for the better.

4) Data Collection:
The post landing page scenario is the goal that you want to achieve through your pay per click campaign. You can collect the user’s name and email address which is a standard practice to target them by email marketing in future. You can also get users to register. Not all of them are comfortable with this. But if you have an attractive product or service, you can neutralise the apprehension of the user. Ensure that the registration process is simple with few fields to fill out.

5) Sales Process:
If you have an ebook that users can download, then the sales funnel would culminate in a secure page where credit card processing is involved. Else, users can be led to an Amazon or ebay page or even a merchant’s site where you are an affiliate and get commission for every purchase made by the user.

If each of the above factors is given due weight and implemented properly, your PPC campaign is well on the path to success. With a good quality score, you do not end up in bidding wars and pay a reasonable cost per click and get to make some decent profits or increase your signups or whatever your goal may be.