SEA and landing pages: still work to do

Fri 26 March 2010 13:46, Stijn De Meyere

Last week-end I’ve been setting up a SEA campaign. When I started looking at the ads that existed for the keywords, it surprised me to see – once again - that there were so many campaigns where the surfer landed on the homepage of the advertiser when clicking the link.

It seems many businesses still have to learn that in online campaigns and certainly in SEA your landing page is crucial.

This reminds me of a survey, I posted about on another blog end of last year (in the Christmas and holiday shopping season), before I became a ‘search cowboy’.

The post was about a study of CrownPeak that found holiday retailers were not making the most strategic use of online search marketing budgets.

CrownPeak analyzed key holiday advertising phrases and hundreds of advertisers and online advertisements and found that 66% of holiday-themed online search advertising drove traffic to the home page of the advertiser or to landing pages that were not clearly tied to the online ad where traffic originated.

And that’s of course a mistake.

Sending search engine users to your homepage forces them to look for what you promise in your ad, and it’s a known fact that a clear link between the content of the ad and the landing page results in a better conversion.

If you ask me, the findings of the study still apply, although the data may have changed.

Landing pages still don’t get the attention they should.

What’s your experience?

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