Pay-per-click advertising, landing page design, and conversion rate optimization are all intrinsically linked.  A successful campaign unifies each tactic under the same strategy.

Too Many Cooks

In a recent marketing consultation with a business owner, we uncovered a problem that it’s hard to believe still happens.

He described his Google Adwords PPC campaigns and the agency who managed them.  He wanted an audit because he wasn’t seeing any results.

Before even doing the audit, we asked how they handled the landing page design and conversion rate optimization work.

He didn’t understand our question.

His PPC company was only managing his Adwords account.  That’s their specialization.  They didn’t have designers who worked on the landing pages.  He wasn’t actually certain what conversion rate optimization (CRO) meant.

We didn’t have to do a complete audit to discover his major issue.  Running a PPC campaign with no landing page or CRO process is like getting together a set of ingredients without a recipe to prepare the actual dish.  In fact, it’s worse.  It’s as if a different cook brought each ingredient, each with their own idea about how to prepare it.

When Tactics Connect

This situation helps us address an important issue with internet marketing.  Namely, that there are really no tactics that exist in a silo.  All your tactics work within the same strategy, and it’s often the case that tactics support and influence each other.

We see this in the connection between advertisements and landing pages.

The effectiveness of the PPC campaign is directly connected to the quality of the landing page.  The idea that an agency would only run a PPC campaign then have no involvement in understanding the landing page performance is absurd.

Yet this practice remains disturbingly common with small business internet marketing.  People hire out multiple vendors to execute individual tactics, with no strategic plan unifying their efforts.

With the all of the platforms, services, and apps that digital marketing must now include, this is untenable.   It’s the reason that Marketing 360® is designed as an all-in-one marketing solution.  With us, the people working on your PPC, designs, and overall strategy all work together.  We don’t even consider starting a PPC campaign without knowing how it will feed into landing pages and result in conversions.

Conversion-Based Campaigns

The resolution for our business owner was clear.  Hire Marketing 360® to put together a comprehensive marketing strategy with mutually supportive tactics and tight execution.

This lets us go back to the strategy level and start integrating tactics.

1. We looked at his keywords to determine which had the highest value for his business goals.
2. Then we considered what his target audience wanted to achieve, and how that connected to his offer.  This tied into his ad copy and call to action.
3. With the ad copy written and a sense of the target audience’s needs, the landing page design became more apparent.

First, an ad with specific info on the services (BMW mechanic) and a strong call to action:

Next, a landing page with message match:

Note the clear calls to action:

This creates a logical progression that matches the needs of the prospective client with the services of the business.

You know what they say about too many cooks in the kitchen.  Digital marketing today is like a recipe.  The ingredients must come together to work under one strategy and achieve interrelated goals.  If one group isn’t talking to the other, you’ll never achieve optimal results.

Here is a visual outline of how conversion rate optimization works:

Courtesy of Quicksprout.