Choose The Right Landing Page For Your PPC Campaign [Part 1]

If you have read many of my articles, you will see that I rank the landing page as one of, if not, the most important element of a pay per click campaign. Why? I will refer to the domino effect. You have worked all so hard to gain targeted PPC traffic to your landing page. If your landing page ‘lets you down’ by being, well, bad, then you will find all that the effort of gaining the traffic before to be pointless. I did an article months ago highlighting the main types of landing pages a PPC advertiser can choose to use. However, I do not mention which one advertisers should use. For this reason, here is some help when it comes to choosing what landing page you want to use for your campaign. 
 
To start things, off, it is good to refresh back over what the main types of landing pages there are:

• Microsite – An extension to the main website.
  
• Homepage – The main/home page of the website.
• Click Through Page – A webpage aimed to cause web users to click through to a different webpage.
• Lead Capture Page – Aims to gather as much information about yourself as possible.
• Product/Service Page – A page dedicated to information about a product/service.
• Infomercial – The equivalent of a TV commercial on the internet.

Now we know what the different types of landing pages are, we need to know which ones we should use for what type of campaigns?
 
For a Microsite, this landing page should be used for PPC campaigns that are trying to promote a product/service. The common problem that occurs is that for individual specific products, advertisers point web users to their homepages. This results in a low conversion rate. By creating a microsite dedicated to something specific, you can make sure the targeted traffic from PPC will not get bored and exit the page but instead make a conversion.
 
For a Homepage, this landing page should be used for PPC campaigns that want the web users to roam their website. The point of forwarding someone to the homepage is that it gives the web user the possibility to look anywhere on the whole website (that is basically what the homepage does). Bloggers will also know that the homepages is the #1 page that gains the lowest bounce rate. For example, on my own website AskWillOnline.com, the bounce rate of the homepage is more than half that of any other page. Therefore, by making web users visit the homepage, you are enticing them to ‘wonder’ around your site and find what they want for themselves.
 
This article is a part one of two. Therefore, make sure you have a look at the part two seeing that it covers the remaining four out of six different types of landing pages.