When it comes to improving a pay per click advertising campaign, you will find that most of the work that goes into improving the campaign goes into either the PPC advert or the landing page’s contents and structure. However, what advertisers need to realise is that the domain name their landing page has and the way they are hosting that domain is just as significant to the campaign’s success than any other element. The problem arises that if you choose a bad host for your domain, you will be paying for traffic that is never ever going to gain you a conversion be it a sale, a click or anything. For this reason, here are a few reasons why hosting domains are important in PPC. Hopefully, this will help make aware that hosting and domain names are actually an important aspect to PPC that needs time and care taken into developing and optimising them.
 

It is the Portal to Your Landing Page

In essence, a host basically delivers your landing page to people wanting to see it on the internet which makes clear that it is an important job. For example, a bad host will result in your landing page being unpredictable and unreliable when it comes to loading it to the PPC traffic you have paid for. If your landing page is struggling to load, not loading at all or have some sort of problem displaying the contents of the page to the web user, the chances are that the web user will lose patience and click away for a better alternative. When it comes to PPC, make sure your hosting service is reliable and can deal with the traffic you want to gain to it (especially for short term PPC campaigns where the amounts of traffic to the landing page will be thick and fast – a good host server is needed for that).
Take the article when I analsyed AutoTrader’s PPC campaign. Originally, I wanted to look at Seat’s PPC landing page but that came up with an error message. This is exactly the type of problem you don’t want in your campaign. It’s been six days and Seat’s landing page is still popping up with an error message! For a car manufacturer as large as Seat, think of how much money they have wasted? It’s staggering.
 
 

Your Domain Name Counts

Along with hosts and servers being important to your campaign’s success, the domain name you choose for your landing page is just as important. For most campaigns, such as many of the ones I’ve analysed like AutoTrader, Pebble’s Smartwatch and Sonos, all of them use their main domains because they are short, to the point and easily recognisable. However, a landing page doesn’t have to go to the main website’s conventions. If you choose to use a different domain or a sub domain, make sure it is short, to the point, easily recognisable and professional looking. In general, the best domains and the shortest ones with the least words in them.
 
 

Bad Hosted Pages Will Cost You

Linking to the first point, when that web user clicks on your PPC advert, you will have to pay for it. Therefore, if, let’s say, 100 people clicked on your advert and only 65 managed to actually load your landing page and the other 35 couldn’t because of reasons to do with your hosted server, you are wasting away 35% of your budget to absolutely nothing. I hope this makes clear that a host and server can potentially lose you a huge amount of money. However, by recognising this you can optimise and improve your campaign by far more than any other element financially.