Pay per click advertising is a fantastic way to drive targeted traffic to your website fast.  You can target by behaviors, location, and device.  You can narrow your audience down to get the most for your PPC budget as well as track all data such as clicks, timing of clicks, bounce rate, and keywords.  However, there are of course many key factors you need to take into account in order to ensure your campaign will be as successful as possible.  The most common issue with PPC campaigns is the bounce rate, and here are the top five reasons your bounce rates are so high:

Landing Page

Where are you sending your click-throughs?  Are you sending them to an ad-heavy page, a cluttered page, or do you have a clear call to action?  The user clicked on your ad for a particular reason depending on what you put in your ad, they are interested in your product/service or they want to learn more about your company.  Either way, you want to direct the user to a landing page that is 100% related and connected to the original ad.  For example, if you have an ad for discounted tablets, you don’t want to drive the user to a page for “Work From Home Jobs”.  This will cause your bounce rates to spike because that’s not why the user clicked on the ad.  See below for an example of a poorly design landing page.  Why?  Too many images and graphics that draw the user away from the call-to-action.  You don’t want to be using too many images that are all competing for your visitor’s attention.

Content

You need to ensure that where your driving your traffic, it’s visually appealing to the user.  The user has taken the iniative to actually click on your ad, so now you have to keep them on your website for as long as possible with the hopes of getting a new customer.  If your design is poor, content is poorly written, and the information is irrelevant than the chances the user will actually remain on the page are very slim.  One very common mistake among PPC campaigns is trying to have keyword-rich content for search engine optimization purposes, however, if you have too many keywords the content will no longer make sense.  You also want to ensure the wording is easy to understand.  For example, if you are selling electronics, don’t use large jargin words as that will confuse the visitor, you want to provide them information as easily as possible.

Pop Ups

Do not have ads popping up in the users face when they click-through your ad.  Doing this is not only a common spam-alert, but most users find it extremely annoying and will usually exit immediately.  Your main goal should be to drive traffic to your landing page in the hopes they’ll find the content relevant to them; not to spam your visitors.

Hope these tips have helped you!  For more tips, strategies, and ideas on how to optimize your pay per click and display advertising campaigns, check back to LookSmart’s Blog regularly.

So our last few blog posts have primarily focused on managing pay per click ad campaigns, competitive bidding, and how to optimize your campaign to get the best CPA.  So now it’s time for us to focus on the final step, which is the landing page that the user is taken to, to hopefully convert.

So the user searches for the term “christmas gifts” on Google.com, they see a search ad for “Holiday Sweets & Treats ONLY $49.99″, click on that ad, and are taken to the advertiser’s website where they will hopefully convert by purchasing something.  The landing page can either be the making or breaking point of a successful PPC campaign, so follow these three strategies in your campaign to boost your conversion rates:

1. Keep it Simple

Some campaign managers want to have colors, text, and graphics everywhere – this is messy, confusing, and has proven to be unsuccessful.  When the user lands on your landing page, they shouldn’t be confused; they should see anicely designed landing page with very simple, yet firm, calls-to-action.

2. Don’t Attack the User

I can’t tell you how many times I land on a landing page and get “attacked” by 1-3 pop up ads – PLEASE do not do this strategy.  This is basically attacking the user and from own personal experience, when pop-ups begin coming, I immediately close out of the window, so avoid that potential bounce issue altogether by avoiding pop-up ads.

3. Focus on Your Call-to-Action

The call-to-action is the most important aspect of your landing page.  You need to be firm, yet polite.  You are basically instructing the user to provide certain information so you don’t want to come off as forceful, yet the user also needs to be told what to do.  So it’s best to use a clear call-to-action such as “Enter Your Information Here”, “Enter Your Email to Receive Your Free….”, etc.  You want to tell the user in a firm, yet polite manner what you need them to do.

Hopefully these landing page strategies have helped you, and don’t forget to check out our blog posts at The Lookout and follow us on Twitter!