PPC - Pay Per Click Management

Following the part one to this two-part article, I will be looking at the remaining four types of landing pages that can be found on my article on the different types of landing pages. In part one, I looked at when pay per click advertisers should choose to use Homepages and Microsites as their landing pages. In this article, I will look at when you should use click through, lead capture, Product/service or a infomercial page as your landing page.  

For a Click Through page, this landing page should be used for PPC campaigns that want to gain a purchase or sign up. Click through page require the web user to have to click on (so it can be seen that the click through page acts as a ‘middle man’ as it is not the landing page the web user should finish on). For this reason, if you want to entice the web user into your product/service or want to create an audience to advertise to when there will need to sign up, you should use a click through page.

For a Lead Capture page, this landing page should be used for PPC campaigns that want to gather as much information about web users as possible. Therefore, lead capture pages are usually used for two reasons:

• To gain a wide audience to advertise to via post and email in particularly.
• To gather market research about a group of targeted people. From using lead capture pages, you can find trends that your target audience have which can enable yourself to exploit this trait to your advantage. For example, if you found most of your target audience are aged 22-25, you can have much more complicated landing pages because the target audience will be able to cope with it more than, let’s say, someone who is 60.

For a Product/Service page, this landing page should be used for PPC campaigns that are, well, trying to advertise or sell a product or service. You may think this is similar, if not, the same as a microsite. However, a product or service page is usually created before a PPC campaign. For example, Braven makes Bluetooth portable speakers. On their website, they have created product pages for each product such as the Braven 600. If you wanted to use a product/service page in a PPC campaign, you would simply link it to the product/service page on your website. The conversion rate is going to be good as the biggest button should be the ‘Buy’ or ‘Add to Cart’ button and it requires little to no effort to add to a campaign because you have created it before even thinking about a PPC campaign.

For a Infomercial, this landing page should be used for PPC campaigns that simply want to advertise their products. There are two ways you can do this with an infomercial:

• Advertise your product to gain as much brand awareness as possible.
• Advertise your product with the objective of wanting a sale by the end of it.

Each way requires a different approach to the infomercial landing page. Usually, it is best to go with the second option as you are indirectly giving your product brand awareness by wanting to sell it. However, take Microsoft and the Surface. If you have sense some of the TV commercials by Microsoft about the Surface, it is people dancing around clicking the tablet to keyboards. They don’t want you to buy it from just looking at the commercial: they want brand awareness first. Therefore, if your product is fairly new, go for brand awareness. If not, look at selling it.