Part of being an advertising or marketing professional is keeping an eye on what goes on in the marketplace for various verticals and products. In doing so, you tend to see things that are done well, done on par, and done poorly. Without diving into the good, the bad and the ugly of all my research, I will say the one thing that aggravates me the most is when brands throw their money away.
Allow me to explain. While recently doing research within the consumer product space, I searched for a keyword that seemed to be gaining some ground and discovered a lot of well written ads, with one that seemed to really reach its audience. After viewing the page of the ad that I liked (don’t worry; it didn’t count as a click), to my surprise it drove me to the homepage. Take note, fellow marketing professionals, this is a big mistake that could be causing the campaign to convert at a CPA (Cost Per Action) that is not as efficient as sending traffic to a more relevant landing page.
Somewhere, you have a marketing team that is coming up with this wonderful game plan of driving traffic, yet they are actually missing out on a huge opportunity and wasting a huge amount of money. How? Paid search engines “penalize” campaigns and quality scores that send traffic to landing pages that do not follow high relevancy to search queries and ad copy. By directing to the home page, this campaign could be paying anywhere from 15% to 600% more per click – not to mention a potentially lower CVR (Conversion Rate) – than a paid search campaign that directs users to a keyword-focused landing page.
They are missing out on a PRIME opportunity to connect with their users. They came up with a great paid search ad that connects to the user based on their needs and pain points, but instead of driving to a page where they can really help the user and provide solutions, they send them to their home page – a page that has no connection to the ad that drove the user to click.
At Mindgruve, we believe that within the paid search world – specifically, the B2C space within Google Paid Search Results – all marketing professionals should apply this simple logic with all advertising in order to avoid losing money:
- Create an ad the makes a promise to your target market
- Drive that ad to a landing page that fulfills the promise
- Deliver on your promise
- Monitor campaigns regularly
The takeaway: Stop throwing your money away by paying more for traffic that isn’t converting as well as it should. By implementing our Create, Drive, Deliver, Monitor strategy as an Optimization and Paid Media best practice within your organization you will start seeing your CPA decrease, CVR increase, and ROI improve.
