The first impression counts: What the entrance area to the store is for stationary retailers, the landing page is for e-commerce. In the best case, the interested customer sees immediately what he is looking for.
Expectations are high, especially in online shopping, because the customer arrives at the store via an ad – if the ad doesn’t deliver what it promises, the customer tries his luck one click further with the competition. But what does the perfect landing page look like? And how can merchants specify it for their ads so that the prospect also becomes a buyer? Automated landing page creation for AdWords is a new option: it allows retailers to reduce effort and save costs.
It’s no secret: A successful AdWords account requires sophisticated campaigns and ads. Plus a good keyword concept with as many variations and segmentations as possible, personalized, extended to the GDN, with remarketing lists. But that’s not all, if you consider that on average 98 out of 100 visitors to a webshop don’t buy. Is it because of the price? If the traffic comes via PLAs or price search engines, it can’t be. Resourceful information architects are now tweaking the concept, optimizing the look of the site and increasing the user experience. This is certainly a good idea, but usually not the solution to the problem: Many retailers invest a lot of time in CPC optimization, ad extension and exact or broad match, instead of taking care of showing the user on the landing page exactly what the ad promises him.
Knowing that potential customers are not patient and don’t want to spend a long time searching for the product they want, you have to go one step further. However, the landing page experience is not only decisive for the bounce rate, but also for the quality factor at Google: AdWords evaluates each keyword with the expected click rate, the ad relevance and precisely the landing page experience. The higher the quality factor, the lower the costs per click for the respective keyword, to put it simply. Optimized landing pages therefore have a double potential: the costs for AdWords can be reduced and profits can be increased through fewer bounces. And that’s what landing pages are all about:
- Relevance: What the ad promotes must be seen on the landing page.
- Authenticity: The landing page should transparently answer classic questions that a buyer asks: Payment and shipping options, shipping costs, trust elements (seal and security needs regarding customer data), prices, contact options and guarantees. This is about the seriousness of the store.
- Navigation: Since recently Google also evaluates the layout of a page. Important factors here are the ability to find information quickly, a simple user interface and a transparent ordering process. SSL encryption and a layout optimized for smartphones also ensure an upgrade of the ad in AdWords.
- Reaching the goal with automated page creation: The most difficult factor to realize for the perfect landing page is probably relevance. The page should match the keyword – but how can that be done with a five- to six-figure number of keywords, as most medium-sized stores have? If you don’t want to employ an army of programmers, you should use a landing page that automatically adapts to the ad. The tool convertizer, for example, builds pages independently from product data and keywords. Merchants simply connect convertizer to their product data and activate access to their AdWords account. Based on a previously defined template, landing pages are then automatically generated for the desired AdGroups, which particularly fulfill the important relevance criterion.
Automated optimization for AdWords professionals
The advantages of automation are obvious: The manual effort is minimized, so that especially quickly changing assortments can be mapped in AdWords on a daily basis. In addition, IT resources are conserved and ultimately cash is saved. In concrete terms, retailers can expect a reduction in the bounce rate, while acquisition costs (customer acquisition costs) are reduced.