PPC advertising can be an effective way to build your email list. PPC is a quick way to jumpstart any online program but the dollars will begin to add up very quickly.

PPC Landing Pages

If you plan to use PPC to build your email list you have to spend some time creating effective landing pages. You are spending real money to drive this traffic so your pages must work hard to convert your traffic into registered email  recipients that you can follow up with later in an attempt to create new business and paying customers.

Here is an article you can use to learn more about the basic concepts of building landing pages. You might also want to read this article about calculating ROI on PPC campaigns.

In addition to the basic elements of a good landing pages in the article previously referenced here are some specific considerations for landing pages developed for PPC campaigns:

Align Landing Page Content With Ad Copy & Keywords

Try different marketing copy based on different keyword phrases you are bidding on This takes a lot of extra work but as mentioned earlier PPC costs can add up very quickly so your extra effort here could save you a lot of cash.

Let’s say you are promoting a service that could be described in multiple ways such as sales outsourcing. Some of the phrases bid on may include:

1. Sales Outsourcing
2. Business Development Outsourcing
3. Appointment Setting
4. Lead Generation
5. Telemarketing

All three phrases revolve around the key concept of having someone else do your cold calling but in unique ways. The outsourcing phrase may appeal to someone looking for a more highly trained extension of their existing sales staff. The lead generation and telemarketing phrase may appeal to someone more interested in volume sales or specific detail about how the process takes place.

To accommodate each category of visitor you may want to develop multiple landing pages, one that focuses on how your service integrates with you existing sales force, one that focuses on the nuts and bolts of how the calls are made, etc.

Also, the relevancy of the content of the page is very important in terms of PPC effectiveness for multiple reasons:

1. Improved quality score
2. Increases reader involvement and time spent on the page
3. Increases conversion

Testing Your Landing Pages

First settle on the ad copy and search terms you are bidding on. When you are sure these are working well only then are you ready to begin testing the content on your landing page(s). The reason why is simple… if you tweak your landing page to get better conversion and at the same time change your ad copy or keywords you will no know which change made the difference.

Start your testing by getting a regular flow of quality traffic to your pages from PPC. Then start editing your landing page copy. When you change your landing page copy do it one step at a time.

Only change one thing at a time, adjust, test, readjust, test etc. If you make too many changes all at once you will not know what changes made the difference. You’ll want to know what the elements are that improve or kill your conversion when the time comes to make a new page for a different promotion.

The Friend Test

Try asking friends or co-workers to take a look at your page (for 5 to 15 seconds) and then give you some feedback. Make sure not to prime the pump by telling them what the page is for… instead have them look at it blind and then ask them questions like:

1. What do you remember about the page?
2. What is the main message of the page?
3. What is the product or service being offered?

If the answers you get correlate to your goals and objectives you are off to a reasonable start… if not you may want to go back to the drawing board before spending valuable time and money on live testing with PPC.  

The Bounce Test

If you have any kind of website analytics set up you should be able to easily determine how long your visitors are staying on your page. If the average time spent on the page is only a few seconds then you page is obviously not grabbing your visitor’s attention.

Technical Considerations For Landing Pages

If you are creating multiple versions of your landing page with only minor variations you should make sure these pages are hidden from the search engine spiders that crawl and index the content of your site. The major search engines will see these pages as duplicate content and punish your site in their search engine results rankings. Leave the standard version of your landing page available for indexing but use a robots meta tag or robots.txt directive to hide the others.

PPC can be a very effective way to generate new contacts, leads and sales. But there can be a lot of money at stake so play smart and careful. Make sure you use all the tricks available to create landing pages with strong conversions. If you put in the effort up-front you can avoid throwing good money away directing people to generic pages like your home page.