When weighing up the most important aspects of a PPC campaign, I often question myself which will have the biggest impact to the conversion rate. The CPC, keywords chosen and advert will contribute to the conversion rate. However, it is the landing page, I feel, which will affect the conversion rate of any given PPC campaign the most. It is the make-or-break part of the campaign. For many advertisers, they let their campaign fall at the last metaphorical hurdle being their landing page because they do not know what their landing page should contain in order to be successful. Need not worry – below are three elements which can be classed as ‘must have’s for landing pages.
 
 

A Encapsulating Heading

You need to make sure your landing page can be easily summed up from just your heading alone. Web user’s attention spans are notoriously bad. Therefore, you will not want to bore them with confusing headings because it is all so easy for the web user to simply click away from your landing page. It is still surprising that their are some PPC campaigns out there that do not have headings on their landing pages. You want to make it as easy as possible for web users to navigate your landing page (and therefore as easy as possible to help you gain a conversion).
 
 

An Image

An image has the possibility and power of a thousand words – this is a must-have essential. Everybody loves images because:

• Images are extremely easy to see.
• You can digest the information of the image far far quicker than reading.
• It can be colourful (and therefore not boring to look at).
• Even lazy people can look at images!

If you have a campaign running now, take a look at your landing page. Has it got an image on it? If not, put one on there! My argument for images to be used can easily be supported by publishers of Google Adsense: although the CPC of image adverts is, on average, lower than text, the CTR is always much higher. This is because people can ‘read’ images easily, faster and better.
 
 

Some Content (But not too much!)

From the different types of landing pages out there, this cannot apply to the infomercial page seeing that the objective of an infomercial landing page is to give web users as much information as possible. For all other landing pages, you will need to make sure that you have some content on your page to explain your advert and landing page’s heading. The important factor which only you can decide upon is how much content should you put on your landing page? The answer is simple: you will not know until you experiment. Try different amounts of content on your landing page and see how your conversion rate fluctuates with Google Analytics. From this, you can control the level of content on your landing page for optimum results.