Whiteboard Wednesday: Ecommerce landing pages for PPC

Ecommerce Landing Pages For PPC from Stephen Pratley on Vimeo.

Whiteboard Wednesdays are our internal training sessions at Shine Marketing. Nothing formal, no death by powerpoint, just turn up and share a bit of what you know with the rest of the team.

This week I was talking about landing pages for PPC campaigns in preparation for taking on a new client's campaign. I thought some of it was worth sharing so I've edited down about 10 minutes of it for the blog.

Some of the main points covered are:

• Make sure your PPC ad matches the search term as closely as possible
• Use Feed2PPC to acheive this without using broad matching which is very wasteful ( as some of the examples show)
• Make sure the landing page matches the search term and the advert as closely as possible
• Use dedicated landing pages, or potentially your search results to group together products when the search term could cover more than one item

After this I started rambling on about landing pages for services businesses. If anyone's interested I'll run something up for that also, but just about everything you need to know about this subject can be summed up in this case study about SEOMoz and  looking at the final landing page at http://www.seomoz.org/pro_landing.php

A few tips from this article about landing pages that are applicable to ecommerce include:

Make your page long enough to tell the product's story.

There is a myth that noone reads copy on the web. On a typical visit, that's true, but the exception is just before someone is about to buy. At that point they get engaged and information hungry, and more so as the price goes up. Look at Amazon's page for the Kindle.

Use imagery to demonstrate the product

Retailers like GIVe are using more and more catwalk video, modelled products, photos from multiple angles, close zoomimages of detail, as well as plenty of text about the product, care instructions and so on. If you think you can get away with less, you're probably kidding yourself. Nick Roberts of ASOS told me last year their bill for models alone is over £1million.

Build trust and show your authority

How you do this will differ depending on your business. Services companies can bask in the glow of thier client list. For fashion retailers, press mentions are great. Also show any money-back guarantees and returns policies clearly without needing to link off to other pages. Your returns policy won't put people off buying....will it?

Make the call to action clear.

Unless you've decided to reinvent the wheel for some reason, 'BuyNow' or 'Add to basket' buttons should be clear and in the right position on your site. The usual problem is that they are not the most obvious button on the page. If you're useing one button style for the whole site, scale up the main call to action and scale down the others.

Let us know what you think of this video and tips, not all our Whiteboard Wednesdays are suitable for sharing, but we'll put up as many as we can.