There are many different types of landing pages advertisers can use such as the click through, lead capture landing page and so on. What has become apparent, though, is that there are still advertisers that tend to like to use homepages as their landing pages. All you have to do is flick through the numerous ‘Analyse A Real PPC Campaign’ series articles to find one that has a homepage as their landing page.
The homepage can be deemed a grey area in PPC since there are reasons for using it and reasons against using it. It is a good place to bring non-targeted traffic to your website as it enables them to find what they want to view easier (if the navigation on the homepage is well optimised). But, at the same time, a homepage is not really designed for PPC campaigns and conversions like other landing pages are. If you find you still want to use your homepage as your landing page, here are a few ways you can improve it to make it better suited for PPC.
 
 

#1 Navigation Menu is a MUST

If you are going to use your homepage as a PPC landing page, it is an absolute necessity to have a navigation menu on it (a good example of this is Amazon). As already mentioned above, a navigation menu allows web users to find specific pages on the website so that you can treat the homepage more like a click through landing page in PPC instead: it has the objective of allowlng web users to click onto a more specific page where the conversion might take place.
Saying this, if you have a well designed website at it is, you should have a good navigation menu on your homepage as it is. As a word of warning, if you do not, do not be surprised to find that you are gaining no results from your PPC traffic heading to your homepage.
 
 

#2 Limit Content to a Minimum

In order to make the most of a homepage as a landing page, it is important to realise that the homepage is ideally not where you want your PPC traffic to land. It should be treated as a click through landing page and a middle man in getting the PPC traffic to head to the webpage where the conversion takes place (with the use of navigation menus). For this reason, there is absolutely no reasons why there should be lots of content on the homepage. The best homepages have the bare minimum amount of content and potentially lots of images as they are pleasing to the eye. This will help prevent web users become tedious and increase the chances of the navigation menu being used to direct the PPC traffic to more specific web pages.