Taking The Wind Out Of Your Sales With Crappy Landing Pages

I’ve been researching the landing pages of PPC Management providers. I wanted to see how well their landing pages were likely to convert. We pay for the click, getting the visitor to our site, but then do we suck the wind right out of the sale with a crappy landing page? The goal of the landing page is going to be to get the visitor to contact you for additional information. I’ve been surprised to find that many of the landing pages I visited, don’t follow Best Practices of PPC landing pages. I would think that companies who sell themselves as PPC management would have the BEST landing pages, because they want to make it EASY for the person looking for PPC management to contact them.

Let’s take a look at some landing pages for the keyword “pay per click management.” Ignoring ad text all together, I’m just going to look at the landing pages for positions #1, 6, and 10. At the time I ran my query, the #1 goes to JumpFly, Quigo checks in at #6, and submission-pro takes 10th.

Landing pages are important to any optimization, but they become extremely important when you are actually paying for the visitor to come to your page. The goal of any PPC campaign is to get the visitor to first CLICK on your ad. Once they have, and they arrive on your landing page, you want them to CONVERT. For PPC management ads, converting means they contact you for more information. Once they click your ad, your landing page has to get them to convert.

The results are in …

Looking at the first place winner, JumpFly, who presumably had the highest CPC and Quality Score, I find no obvious call to action. There is a phone number, and text link at the top to contact them, and down at the bottom of the page, last paragraph there is another link to their contact page. But I’m not going to see those Calls to Actions as I’m skimming the page. I’m going to look at the text for what I’m after. Nothing stands out to prompt me to convert. Assuming I were looking for Pay Per Click management, JumpFly made it harder than it needed to be for me to contact them for my business. If they don’t get their own landing page right, can I trust they’ll get mine right? I use the back arrow.

Now let’s look at the result #6, Quigo. Wow, a big difference. Of course Quigo does content-targeted ad serving, which is not the same as the results we find on Google, Yahoo or MSN. That being the case, their method is likely to be different. Their landing page is a contact form. It has a quick to read bulleted list of information about their services, but the biggest thing I see is their contact form. I might just fill out their form before I click back to see what other advertisers have to say about their services.

The # 10 result, Submission-Pro, has a great title “Pay-Per-Click Search Engine Advertising” which is pretty much what I was looking for. On the left side of the page I can see contact phone numbers, and a contact tab at the top of the page, and there is a lot of text for me to read. If I scroll down to the middle of the page, they have made it easy for me to contact them by providing me with a form right on the page. The problem though, is that there is too much text for me, I’m not terribly likely to get to the bottom of the page. Even after the form, they go on with more text.

In summary …
Of the three landing pages I just looked at, was there one that filled my sales with wind, or one that sucked the wind right out of them? There were aspects and elements of each page that I equally liked and disliked. JumpFly had the best ‘looking’ page, but made it hardest for me to contact them. I’d say they had a steady breeze blowing, making it possible for me to find what I was looking for. Quigo, I’d say, had a huge gust of wind made it easiest for me to contact them, but the gust was so large I had no idea exactly where I’d end up, there wasn’t enough information. Submission-Pro certainly provided enough information, so much information they sucked the wind right out of the sale.

All this evaluation doesn’t really tell me how successful each page will be at converting. What I have to do is TEST. I can use these results to take the best of what I saw, and create my own landing pages and TEST them for conversions.