A successful Google Adwords campaign necessarily requires persuasive landing pages that lead visitors to becoming customers or clients.
A landing page is the first web page a user is sent to when he or she clicks on a link or an Adword ad.
Important Tip: One of the most common, costly mistakes made in most online marketing programs is to use a site’s home page as the default page to which a searcher is directed instead of sending the visitor to another page that is more relevant and targeted to a specific keyword query. Result: lower conversions, fewer sales, more expense.
Buying Funnel and Selling Funnel
If you were to consult with a Google Adwords professional in the hopes of successfully---profitably---advertising on Google, at some point in the consultation you’d hear about the “Buying Funnel”; i.e. the step-by-step process that leads a consumer to buy something.
Typically, a consumer’s buying process goes something like this:
Need---determining that there’s a need, desire, or problem
Awareness---becoming aware of products, services, or solutions to the problem
Learn---gathering information and narrowing down choices
Decision---narrowing choices to one product or service and buying
After Purchase Reflection---evaluating whether the right decision was made or the problem solved
At each step of the buying process, there’s a narrowing that lends itself to a visualization like a funnel, wide at the top and narrow at the bottom.Ideally, a page should persuade visitors that what the marketer offers is what the consumer wants and leads to a decision to purchase.
It’s probably safe to say that while most folks who advertise on Google either have no---or, at most, only a rudimentary---concept of the Buying Funnel, fewer still have ever heard of the online Selling Funnel.Too bad for them; good for you if you take it into account in your marketing web design.
Here are the two funnels side-by-side:
Whereas the “Buying Funnel” involves the step-by-step process a buyer uses to make the purchase, the internet “Sales Funnel” is the step-by-step process an internet marketer takes to help convert a search query into a sale.
Basically, your Sales Funnel will have these elements:
Finding a Prospective Buyer---via advertising or organic (free) search
Develop Rapport---start building a relationship via a landing page that has appropriate messaging for your targeted marketed (think targeted keywords)
Show You Qualify for Trust---provide information aimed at answering questions of interested visitors designed to build trust
Present Your Best Face---set your site, product, or service apart from competitors and show benefits of buying what you are offering
Close---seal the deal
As you looking at the two funnels side-by-side imagine the implications for your Adwords marketing web design.Since there are now easy-to-use, free tools to determine how people are searching the Net, we can literally anticipate those searches before they are made and build landing pages designed to maximize profitable conversions.
Successful landing pages have certain common characteristics.They:
Identifyproducts or services that people are looking for in their search by employing the same or similar highly relevant keywords that a searcher uses in a search query
Optimizefor highly relevant keywords used by searchers and employed in Adwords Ads
Persuadeconsumers through highly relevant copy and content
Build Trust and increase user’s confidence as they read the page
Engage visitors by providing with answers to their questions about a product or service
Enhance a customer’s experience through better usability and navigation and
Providea clear, persuasive call to action
You can send traffic to any page on your site, of course, but expect significant, perhaps drastic, differences in conversion rates as you do so.Sending all your traffic to your home page in your Google Adwords campaign may be the easiest thing to do but it’s usually not advisable.The higher the page’s relevancy to the searcher’s query, the better your chances to convert.
Landing page optimization (search engine optimization) will aid your page’s search rank (page 1 of Google Search is the goal) which, in turn, will bring free organic traffic in addition to that for which you are paying.
Fact is, while it may appear at first blush that building effective, profitable landing pages will take a considerable amount of time, building an ineffective landing page will cost a considerable amount of money in wasted clicks and lost income opportunities.
Profitable advertising on Google is part art, part science (testing, testing, testing) but taking extra time up-front to link your keywords or ad groups with the most specific, highly relevant landing pages on your site will keep your visitors focused and their attention drawn farther into the buying funnel.
