I am completely amazed to say that this article I am writing right now is my 434th article I have published on PPC.org. That’s crazy, isn’t it? What I have found over the years from writing articles about pay per click advertising is that there are still many questions left unanswered about PPC. Many of these questions are from advertisers new to PPC. Unfortunately, I just don’t have the time to respond to all of these questions so what I thought it would be a good idea is to include two of the main questions people ask me about PPC with, hopefully, detailed answers of these questions.
 
 

What is the Best Landing Page to Use?

What landing page you choose to use depends greatly on the type of campaign you have in PPC. To answer this question, what is your campaign’s objective? Looking at the different types of landing pages out there:

• If it is to sell a product, a product/service page will do well.
• If it is to gain information from the web user, you will want a lead capture page.
• If you just want to gain traffic, you may just want to send the PPC traffic to your homepage so they have access to the whole of your website.

The truth to the answer to this question is that there is no specific landing page that can be deemed ‘the best’ because one type of landing page may work well with one of your campaigns while not working well for another. All I could say is that I feel a infomercial page is a landing page that isn’t worth ever using – I just cannot see the attraction in them.
 
 

How Do You Perform Research on Your Market and Competitors?

This is an interesting question. It is vital to know as much as possible about your market and your PPC competitors before you create your campaign and compete against these competitors in that market. But, how do you do this?
 
For me, there are a few easy ways of doing this which will help you get a better understanding of what your entering into:

• Create a campaign to gain information from your web users. The best way to do this is make a quick campaign that leads the traffic to a lead capture page. Offer an incentive to the web users to give over information about themselves. This will better help you understand the type of people you are trying to target through PPC.
• Look at competitor’s PPC campaigns. You can do this exactly the same way I analyse PPC campaigns in my ‘Analyse A Real PPC Campaign’ series such as for Fitbug and SammyDress. Look at what they have done for their search advert and how their landing page is designed.

 
Hopefully this will give you a better idea about PPC from answering them two questions above. What you need to understand is that, for the majority of PPC campaigns, there is no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ decision. PPC is about trying, failing, trying again and then succeeding.