I’ll be speaking on Ecommerce this Thursday December 14 at the Entrepreneur Center of the SBDC TAP (Small Business Development Center Technology Advisory Program, 84 W. Santa Clara St - downtown San Jose 95113)

The holiday party starts at 6pm and will include:

• 15 Minute Technology Demonstrations on Mobility, Ecommerce, Finance, VoIP
• Valuable door prizes
• FREE online subscription to Small Business Technology Magazine
• Networking with Leading Technology Consultants and Local Small Business Entrepreneurs

Register online here
Looking forward to seeing some of you there!

The landing page is the first web page a visitor sees after she clicks on an AdWords ad (the little text-only ads you see on the right hand side of a search results page). The web address for this page is sometimes called the “destination URL” or the “clickthrough URL”.

Since the idea of placing AdWords ads is to generate an action from the user, the landing page should help the user continue on the path to completing the action. She already has initiated the action by clicking on your ad. You don’t want to lose her after that - you want to “convert” her.

The best landing pages consider the users’ intent when they click on an ad. You should consider your keywords and ad’s text. Ask yourself, “What information does the user need next in order to (fill in this blank)?” The whole point is to give the user what she wants and don’t make her hunt around your website for it. The best thing would be for the user to land on a page that gives her the most useful and accurate information about what she’s just clicked on.

The landing page may or may not be the same as your homepage. There are a few different ways to think about this:

• If you’ve advertised about a specific product or service, the landing page should prominently feature that product or service. Maybe that product or service is the only one on the page. For example, if you’re a shoe store advertising yellow boots, take the user to the yellow boots page, not the homepage.
• If you’re have a special offer, your landing page should make the special offer very obvious. The special offer might be the only topic on that page.
• If your ad references a section of your business, such as “cat boarding” in a veterinary hospital, you would want the user to land on the cat boarding services page of your website (not the homepage).
• If your ad advertises your whole business, for example “cat boarding”, your landing page would probably be your home page.

Another reason to provide quality landing pages is that it could end up costing you less. According to Google:

“…advertisers who are not providing useful landing pages to our users will have lower Quality Scores that in turn result in higher minimum bid requirements for their keywords.”

Over the past year (2005-2006), Google has twice made changes to its algorithms for landing page quality in AdWords. Google has stated that these changes only negatively affected a small number of advertisers, so they probably would not affect your website. What’s useful to know here is that Google is looking at your website the same way a potential user would.

Real Examples

I googled “acupuncture for headaches”. Here are the Google search results:

Search for “acupuncture for headaches” on Google

Here’s what happened when I clicked each of the four Sponsored Search links on the right side of the screen:

Acupuncture New Jersey took me to this clinic’s homepage. I had to click three times to get to an Adobe Acrobat (“PDF”) file with case studies about the use of acupuncture for headaches.
San Francisco Acupuncture took me to the homepage for the American College of Traditional Chinese Medicine. I clicked twice to see a list of conditions they treat, but there was no specific information about headaches (The word “San Francisco-Oakland-San Jose, CA” at the bottom of the ad indicates that this is a local AdWords result, which is useful, because I’m near San Francisco).
Acupressure for Headache is an affiliate marketing website.
Acupuncture for Headaches is an online medical insurance broker.

If you were an SF Bay Area acupuncturist specializing in headaches and used local AdWords search, you’d be one of two advertisers for this keyword, and you could do a much better job with your landing page just by reading this article.

Landing Page Content

Figuring out and answering the questions your visitors will have is the key to an effective landing page which results in conversions.

Taking the above example, what I would want to know if I were to land on an Acupuncture clinic page:

• Is the acupuncturist licensed or accredited? Is this the industry standard?
• Is the acupuncturist experienced? How many years has he been practicing? Did he go to a good school?
• Does he specialize in particular conditions?
• How long does treatment last? How will I know that this treatment is going to be effective?
• Can I use my medical insurance?
• I want to feel comfortable about the acupuncturist, the facility and the acupuncture process.
• Does he have referrals from Western doctors or other clients?
• Does he give well-thought out and useful information on his website?
• Does he know a little about a lot of alternative therapies or a lot about acupuncture?
• Can I get sense of what sort of person the acupuncturist is? Are there photos?
• How do I make an appointment or ask questions?
• If I had a specific condition that I had typed into Google, I would want to know if he treated it and about his experience and knowledge of treatment of that condition. References

  Wikipedia entry on landing pages
  Seth Godin on Landing Pages
  Google AdWords Landing Page & Site Quality Guidelines
  Inside AdWords, the Google AdWords blog
  Pay Per Click Search Engine Marketing for Dummies, Peter Kent, 2006.

  [Thank you to Tracy Rabold for this article - Ed.]