Pay per click landing pages have arguably one of the most important jobs in a PPC campaign. It is the 
point of the campaign where the conversion takes place. For this reason, I like to refer to it as the ‘last domino to fall over’ for a conversion to take place.
With this in mind, here are some important do’s and don’ts PPC advertisers should take note of when it comes to creating and optimising a landing page for PPC.
Don’t Use a Homepage as a Landing Page
Although there are some rare cases where this will work (such as with Amazon and when you are targeting your own brand name), the vast majority of PPC campaigns out there should require a dedicated page that has been fine tuned to satisfy the needs of the PPC traffic it is obtaining. Homepages in PPC are poor performing as a landing page because they require the web user to find the information that is relevant to what they just read in the PPC search advert: you are requiring more work from the web user which will only increase the exit/bounce rate as well as reduce the conversion rate.
Landing pages should make work for the web user as easy as possible so that they have less reason to exit the landing page and more reasons to stay on it.
Do Use Rule of Three
The rule of three is a way of describing a technique used to entice and persuade people about something. As it states in the name, it is literally achieved through listing three different points that work towards your end goal. For example, if I was creating a landing page about cheap bank loans, I would have a rule of three along the lines of:
- Cheapest interest rate of 2% AER
- Award winning mobile app to manage your finances
- 24/7 customer support
Don’t Hide Your Call to Action
The call to action is a crucial part to the landing page because it instructs the web user exactly what to do – without a CTA, the web user will lack guidance as to how they should react with the landing page and will have to use their initiative when it comes to interacting withe the page instead. Of course, this won’t help your landing page performance at all…
For this reason, always make sure you make it extremely clear what the call to action of your landing page is. Pretty much every PPC landing page should have one and locate it in the prime location of the page too.
Do Analyse Your Landing Page
Many people create landing pages and think ‘that is it, I’ve optimised it so my work here is done’…wrong!
Landing pages, and PPC campaigns for that matter, are live things. By this, you cannot simply ‘finish’ it since it will need minor tweaks here and there and changes made to them over time. This is backed up with evidence coming from an analytical program of your landing page such as Google Analytics which will tell you just exactly how your landing page is doing and the weaker areas of it too.
