I found out about Jonathan Mendez’s Blog after he replied to one of my posts about LonelyGirl15. I think Mendez is saying there’s a lot of money left on the table because of poor landing page optimization with PPC and that you need the right platform and methodology in order to optimize in the first place.
I think that’s true and way too many businesses take short cuts because they think they know what customers want, and usually, they’re wrong.
I love the chart above, it represents customer segmentation - what you need to determine as your optimize your landing pages for PPC is what audience responds to them in the first place?
"Since about half of all online ad dollars go into paid search, landing page optimization can reap tremendous rewards. The very nature of search marketing affords us the opportunity to deliver contextual relevance in ways that were unimaginable to marketers just a decade ago. Also, these search-focused strategies transfer to other forms of user-controlled media or pull marketing, which should be gaining more attention in your marketing plans. "
Consider how far you can go with optimization - much more can be done that most people ever imagined. One of my architectual house plan clients spent several thousand dollars a month for absolutely 0 conversions, most of the time. I could not talk them into doing anything major to address this problem as…they knew it all; you can do is bring a horse to water - you can’t make it drink if it don’t want to - better not to work with such a client and I no longer do.
But here’s what you could do with PPC Landing Page Optimization according to Jonathan Mendez.
Keyword – If the visitor’s search query included color specificity the product landing page will display the color match product image and have supporting copy for the color that matches the user query.
Geo - It’s the middle of January. As a clothing retailer I show down jackets and snow boots on my homepage to users from Maine however I show polo shirts and loafers to my users from Florida.
Referrer – Visitors from the comparative shopping engines will land on product pages optimized with additional product options matching their category interest since these visitors are likely still in the consideration phase.
Stage - A customer that purchased shoes will be shown socks and belts should they return to the homepage within 30 days of their purchase. Should they return after the season changes (if they live in a seasonal climate) they’ll be show the season’s newest shoes.
An often-overlooked one…
Language – My visitor used a Spanish language search query or came from a Spanish language site deliver so her landing page will be in Spanish.
The technology exists - imagination, skill and money are the limits. But consider this: were the client I left stopped, put some of the 0 conversion money into PPC landing page optimization (as I set up for them, but they walked away from it), such as what’s mentioned above - they’d have been way ahead today.
"After you’ve discovered the high impact segment you want to optimize that’s when the fun begins. Through the wonder of JavaScript (the bedrock for most of the next-generation web applications), delivering relevant messages through targeted content delivery on your landing pages as exemplified above can be implemented quickly and easily".
With the right approach most of this is not that hard to do - even with a small budget. Again, it takes some progressive thinking to take advantage of what technology can offer.
I run into this a lot with artists, who are not enabled for this type of optimization in most cases (they don’t run PPC most of the time). In a way though, much of what Jonathan Mendez’s approch to PPC landing page optimization could also help a landing page to buy an artists’ prints, or to order a book.
I don’t say it’s a perfect fit - a lot of money is being left on the table because landing pages are not being optimized.
