From online advertising to its website landing pages, a company's marketing strategy is just that, - strategic.

Or at least it should be! 

Yet too often Adwords advertisers don’t think about what a prospect is going to see once they’ve clicked on an ad.

Often a prospect is left to navigate their way through the site to find what they were initially interested in. Instead of being gently taken by the hand and offered the information they were interested in, many leave the site almost straight away.

Why?  Because what the ad promised, and what they ended up was not relevant and lacked sufficient interest to them.

This would-be site visitor translates to what is called a “bounce rate”in Google-speak. It’s a key indicator to watch on your site. If it starts getting high (say over 50%), it’s time to start asking the hard questions.

Questions like:

• Is the page my prospects are landing on too general?
• Is it even boring (even though it works for me)?
• Are there other things on the page that could end up distracting my visitors or take them off the page?

Google is adamant that that web searchers get relevant, quality results for their searches.

What does this mean to you if you’re Adwords advertiser? Well – put simply, if you want success with Adwords, you need to offer relevant, quality results to a user’s search query.

To not do this is not just a case of missing out on extra potential sales or other conversion goals.

As a form of quality control, Google checks your landing pages to grade you as part of something they call “Quality Score”.

They will penalize you with higher costs and lower positioning if your landing page is not up to scratch.  So you can expect to see a higher cost per click in some cases, and a lower position on the page as well if you lack relevancy to search queries.

There is some good news here as well! Google can also reward you with lower costs and positioning for a high quality landing page if you improve your quality score. This means that you can sometimes end up paying less money for a higher ad position on the search query results page, as well as less money for the number of clicks that you get.

It’s always interesting to me as a marketer to see how just many Adwords advertisers send the traffic they are paying for through landing pages that they have not given a lot of thought to.

Yes, I know it’s tempting just to send someone to the easiest page on your site. It’s a lot quicker, and doesn’t require the time and perhaps additional cost of a purpose-built additional page to your site.

However, if you are doing Adwords - dollars to doughnuts, you are leaving money on the table if your page doesn’t do what it should.

It stands to reason that there’s not much point spending money on generating clicks for your ad if people lose interest shortly after getting to your landing page. Your conversion rates will not increase if the page you send prospects to if it doesn’t give them what they want and expect to see.

So it’s worth making sure that you’ve got this side of your internet marketing well and truly covered off.

Once you’ve had an opportunity to analyse web user behaviour on your site, you want to make sure that search terms being used are also being utilized the right way on the page that prospect lands on. 

If you have a relatively new site and you’re not an Adwords advertiser, it can take a little while to get enough data to do this. 

However, if you’ve had a site  - and better still an Adwords account for a while - both of these can both be analysed together to find the best converting keywords for a particular product or service on your site. By doing this prior to creating a landing page, you can be a lot more targeted and relevant to your visitors’ search.

By creating relevance between the ad your prospect clicked on, and the content of the page they land on, you then increase your opportunities for conversion.

A landing page makes it easier for your visitors to:

• Answer basic questions, starting with “Am I at the right place?”
• Absorb and digest the key messages you want them to
• Complete a desired course of action, e.g. signup, purchase, etc.

Doing the above means satisfied needs. Satisfied needs mean happy customers, and a healthy bottom line for you. 

The Acid Test:  Does Your Website Landing Page Measure Up?

If your landing page is looking less than ideal, here’s an opportunity to do something about that.

We’re offering 10 free online marketing consultations on Landing Page Audit valued at $140.00 to the first 15 NBM clients who put their hand up! Time and resources unfortunately mean we can’t offer this to all of our clients.

We’ll give you our professional and honest opinion on whether your current landing page for your Adwords prospects could be improved, based on your campaign, your current landing page results, and our online marketing knowledge.

You’ll get a free low-down on where your landing page gets brownie points, and if there is room for improvement, where it could do with some help to do the job you intend for it.

You’re welcome to use this knowledge to help us build you a page that’s tailor-made for the job at hand, or simply leave it as it is.

The best thing is you’ll know exactly whether or not there are things that can be improved or changed to help boost your current results.

If you’d like us to check out whether you’re the pages your Adwords prospects are

To make sure you’re one of the 10 NBM clients who get to benefit from this offer, call the office today on (07) 5580 3933 or email us at solutions@nbm.com. We’ll work out mutually convenient time to get together to make sure you’re on track!

It’s the fastest way to make sure you’re not a Google advertiser who’s leaving money on the table!