Flight PPC09, You are Cleared for Landing

One of the core products that Webbed Marketing offers is Search Engine Marketing through Pay-per-Click (PPC) advertising.  This is the piece of WM business that I manage, consisting of clients from the software, healthcare, services, and marketing industries. It is an interesting business because you learn so much from the daily interactions that users have with your ad campaigns.  You learn pretty quickly what works vs. what works really well.  I recently had a PPC "booyah" moment that I thought I'd share because it really worked well.

One of the hardest parts of my job is to convince our clients of the importance of landing pages.  When we consult with a new client, we ask them to describe their goals, to which most clients respond with the standard lead generation aspect that PPC provides. They are usually open to suggestions on target markets, keyword strategies, budgeting, and even message and tone within the ad copy.  But bring up the topic of landing pages, and that's where the IT department has to get involved, which makes most marketing managers cringe.  (No offense IT people; It's your world, and we marketers just live in it).

I have one client (your know who you are, Mr. December Client of the Month) who is willing to try anything.  The client has a very successful campaign that has produced 82 leads for an online certification program.  I pitched the idea of creating product specific landing pages with an obvious offer (a product demo in this case), in exchange for user information.  He created two versions of the page, one long and the other short, but both with a form and offer.  We uploaded the pages to the campaign last  Thursday, and since then have seen some significant results.  Here is a brief overview of the effect these pages had on this campaign:

So in 6 short days, the landing pages produced 27% of the web leads that the campaign has produced YTD.  Using the same ad copy and the same offer with a different landing page, the conversion rate was nearly 10.5% higher with a click thru rate that was actually lower than the YTD average.

Now these results are not typical, but even if your campaign produced a quarter of these numbers, how sweet would it look when you show your CMO a 7% increase in leads at a 3% conversion rate? 

Looking for PPC help in 2009?  Contact us to discuss your marketing goals in 2009.

Tags: A|B testing, landing page analysis, Landing page consulting, landing page design, Ohio SEM Agency, pay-per-click advertising, PPC agency, search engine marketing