The Lost Vacationer and the Cost of Poor Landing Page Strategy

Whenever I perform a competitive SEM analysis, it’s amazing to see how many companies are struggling with, or have completely ignored, landing page strategy. Those companies (including some big brands) often drop prospective customers off on their homepage and expect them to find their way (and of course, convert). Not only can this approach lead to a big drain on ROI, it’s completely unnecessary. To me, it’s critically important to develop a strong landing page strategy during the setup phase of an SEM account. Correctly mapping ad groups or keywords to landing pages can make or break your campaigns.

The Lost Vacationer

When explaining landing page strategy to new clients, I often bring up what I call “The Lost Vacationer Problem”. I find it helps everyone quickly understand the value of identifying optimal landing pages by ad group. 

If someone visited New York City on vacation and wanted to see Central Park, but you dropped them downtown in the financial district, how happy do you think they would be? Not very. They would have to look at a map (your website navigation), ask some questions along the way to New Yorkers walking by (via your Search box), and slowly find their way uptown to Central Park (traversing your site). Some people may give up and decide not to go to Central Park (bounce), and probably end up doing something else (visit your competition).

As you can see, it would have been much stronger to drop that person off right in Central Park. If you apply this scenario to your own SEM campaigns and landing pages, you probably won’t make this mistake.

SEM Landing Page Mapping – Organization is Critical

When going through the process of mapping ad groups to landing pages, it’s easy to see how an organized and granular setup is important. For example, if you had a product category on your ecommerce website, along with several subcategories, you would want to make sure each had its own ad group. Then you would want to make sure your keywords don’t overlap. Each ad group should be targeting a very specific set of keywords, which would enable you to drive targeted visitors to the right landing pages. Going one step further, each product within those categories could have its own ad group, which would enable you to run specific, product-based keywords.

If you use this approach across your top categories, subcategories, and products, you can see how quickly the account could expand to hundreds of ad groups. Yes, it’s a tedious setup, but it can pay huge dividends down the line. This type of setup and landing page mapping also makes it easier to analyze and manage. For example, using this setup you could easily identify ad groups with low ROI and manage them to increase performance. I’ve always said that it’s hard to recover from a poor account structure, and this is especially true when accounts grow in size. Start with the right setup from the beginning and you’ll be in much better shape management-wise (which can directly impact the performance of your campaigns.)

A Quick Look at Some Common Landing Page Strategy Issues

Earlier, I mentioned that I see a lot of problems with landing page strategy while performing audits or researching industries. I’ll cover some common scenarios below, and then how to approach fixing them.

1.) The Homepage Problem
This is probably the most common scenario I come across. A company might set up its campaigns and ad groups and drive all paid search traffic to its homepage. This is completely unnecessary and can absolutely kill your ROI. Remember the tourist we dropped off in the financial district of New York City earlier? If you are simply dropping prospective customers on your homepage, then you are probably asking them to do too much. For example, if someone searched for Adidas trail running sneakers and you have 9 brands of running sneakers on your site, within 7 different sneaker categories, then you very well could be wasting your SEM budget. They will have to do a lot of work to find what they need.

Instead, drop them on the most appropriate page on your site, whether that’s a product page, category page, subcategory page, or campaign landing page. It can make a big impact on user experience, your conversion rate, and ROI.

2.) The Greedy Ad Group
There are times that keywords trigger ads for queries beyond what they should be targeting. The culprit is often broad match keywords that trigger ads for queries that are broadly related to the keywords you are targeting. Those variations might be products within a category, or subcategories within a category (or worse). This can lead to some interesting scenarios, which can end up frustrating prospective customers and costing you money. Imagine searching for a specific product, only to be dropped off on a top-level category page. After quickly looking around, you find the site in question doesn’t even carry the product you need. And by the way, that’s if you even stay on the website. Often, visitors won’t stay and will bounce faster than you can say “waste of time”.

In order to avoid the greedy ad group, make sure you keep an eye on your broad match keywords. To hone your targeting, you should be using negatives to weed out untargeted queries. If you aren’t familiar with negatives, they enable you to stop your ads from showing if a negative keyword is present in the query. Don’t underestimate the power of using negatives. Also, you should make sure you have an organized and granular set of ad groups (covered earlier). If you do, and you don’t have overlapping keywords competing for impressions, you shouldn’t run into this situation often. For example, you might have ad groups set up for running sneakers, cross trainers, and basketball sneakers, all focusing on their respective categories. In addition, using negatives in each ad group to avoid overlap can help you drive visitors exactly where they need to go.

3.) Another “Greedy” Example - Brand Ad Groups
There are times that brand-focused ad groups start ranking for product-related queries. This might be due to a lack of product ad groups, or the brand ad group cannibalizing product ad groups. Often, companies don’t know this is the case until an audit picks it up.

Let’s say you were an electronics retailer and carried a line of Samsung TV’s. If you simply had an ad group set up targeting the brand, then that ad group could easily end up ranking for specific Samsung products. This is similar to the broad match problem listed earlier, but just focused on brands. During audits, I’ve seen brand ad groups trigger ads for very specific product queries. The destination URLs for these ad groups were the brand landing pages, which isn’t optimal for visitors searching for a specific product. You would obviously want them to land on the product detail page, if possible.

Similar to what I mentioned earlier, you should make sure you have product ad groups set up, and that you use negatives wisely. Then you can trigger your brand-focused ad when someone is searching for the brand, and then trigger product-specific ads when someone is looking for the product.

4.) 404’s
By now, you should know that driving prospective customers to the most relevant landing pages possible is the best path to take in SEM. Although we know that dropping visitors on your homepage or irrelevant landing pages is not a great move, it actually could be worse… owh about if your site threw errors when prospective customers attempted to view your landing pages? That’s right, they can’t see anything. You still paid for the click, but have no possible way to convert that visitor.
Unfortunately, this happens more than you think. This is especially true for companies running hundreds of ad groups across their campaigns.  It could happen when URLs disappear overnight; maybe the product went out of stock, maybe there is a CMS issue, or maybe the product URL simply changed. Regardless, this can wreak havoc on your campaign performance.

The first way to avoid this situation is to clearly communicate the risk of this happening with your web operations group (or the administrator of the website). Many people outside of SEM won’t understand the implications of removing products, changing URLs, etc. A solid education can go a long way. The next thing you should be doing is monitoring ROI for each ad group (which should obviously be part of your ongoing management responsibilities).

If you see ROI begin to decline quickly, you should double-check your ads and destination URLs. You might find ads that lead to 404’s or application errors. If this is the case, you should either quickly pause the ad group or correct the destination URL. Then you should follow up with your site administrator to understand why this happened. You also might want to set up an email alert that gets sent when products go out of stock. This can potentially save you thousands of dollars in wasted ad spend, while also maintaining the best user experience possible.

A Note About Param1 in adCenter
Earlier this year, I wrote a post explaining how to use param1 and param2 to dynamically tailor your ad text and your destination URLs. Landing page-wise, param1 can be used to provide dynamic destination URLs per keyword. Using param1, you can send prospective customers to the most relevant landing page possible, even via keywords that are part of the same ad group. If you are interested in learning more about param1, then you should check out my post linked to above.

Avoid The Lost Traveler Problem and Increase ROI
I hope this post helped you understand the power of developing a strong landing page strategy. Although the concept sounds obvious, companies often overlook mapping ad groups to the right landing pages.

As I explained earlier, you can think of prospective customers as tourists looking for a very specific destination. You shouldn’t make them work, they shouldn’t be disoriented, and they definitely shouldn’t be dropped off downtown when they are looking for Central Park. Instead, you should drive prospective customers to landing pages that are relevant to their query.

Now where is The Carnegie Deli? I’m getting hungry.

GG

Glenn Gabe is a digital marketing consultant at G-Squared Interactive and focuses heavily on SEO, SEM, Social Media Marketing and Web Analytics.  Glenn has over 15 years of experience and has held leadership positions both in-house and at a global interactive agency.  He has helped clients across a wide range of industries, including consumer goods, pharmaceuticals, healthcare, military, education, non-profits, ecommerce and publishing.  Glenn is a columnist for Search Engine Journal and also writes about the latest in digital marketing strategy on his own blog, The Internet Marketing Driver.