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All week we’ve been writing on Advanced PPC Strategies. So far we’ve covered everything from trademark policies and international PPC to special B2B considerations. My charge today is to explain how you can increase conversion rates and overall relevancy with dynamic landing page content. By now most PPC advertisers know that dynamic keyword insertion (DKI) can be a powerful tool for increasing click-through-rates for ad copy. What most don’t realize is that this tactic can be applied to landing pages, too!
Of the countless actions that we take each day as PPC advertisers, nearly all of them concern relevancy. Keyword selection starts the process of targeting your product or service to the right searchers. Writing ad copy is the next step as you connect with those searchers through enticing and relevant messaging. Post-click activities on your landing page are your chance to convert searchers into customers.
The advertisers who see the best results are those who have mastered the landing page. In today’s environment of detailed segmentation, those who effectively create landing pages for each and every one of their product lines or service offerings traditionally see the best conversion rates. Some advertisers have landing pages for a single campaign, others break down at the ad group level, then there are the PPC gurus who truly go granular with landing pages at the keyword level.
If you have the means to do this, great! The problem for many advertisers is that it isn’t feasible to create and maintain landing pages for 100s or 1000s of keywords. Since relevancy is the name of the game, how can you get around this? Create dynamic landing page content. The major PPC search engines allow advertisers to utilize DKI to input the keyword triggered by a search directly into the ad text. This is a simple way to make your ad text as relevant as possible to the searcher. You can utilize this same strategy for landing pages by making minor changes to the code of your landing page. You can essentially use DKI in the page title and any text within the headlines and body content of your landing page.
This is where we get advanced. If you don’t have experience with coding landing pages, don’t freak out – this process is actually pretty simple. Let me take a second to state this fact – I’m not a programmer. I have a high level understanding of code (enough to make minor changes for my clients), and I find this process to be a cinch! The guys over at SEMvironment have blazed this trail already, and I’m going to borrow heavily on their expertise. I would highly recommend you check out their original post.
Before you start, you will need to append the following to the destination URLs of your ads: ?kw={keyword} In AdWords, Yahoo and adCenter this will dynamically enter the keyword into your ad’s destination URL. Now that your ads are setup, you need to save your landing pages as .php files. If you don’t have the capability to save and work with php coding, there is a workaround for html pages. Apply the following line of text to your .htaccess file: AddType application/x-httpd-php .htm .html This workaround will allow you to use php codes within the html code!
From here, you can utilize a simple line of code to dynamically insert your keyword anywhere on your landing page: <? echo $_GET[‘kw’] ?> Please note that this will insert the keyword, but doesn’t take into account the possibility of errors, i.e. someone arriving at your landing page directly (not from a PPC ad). So, there is additional “if-then” coding you can insert that will utilize default text in the case of an error:
<?php
if ($_GET[‘kw’])
{echo ucwords($_GET[‘kw’]);}
else
{echo ucwords(“Default Text”);}
?>
Whereas DKI in an ad text will likely increase your CTR, dynamically inserting keywords into your landing page will likely increase your conversion rates. This process will tailor fit your landing page to each and every searcher that views it. This level of relevancy will help you target your potential customers with pinpoint accuracy! Once again, I’d like to thank the guys at SEMvironment for their great “NUDE” post on this subject. There are also a few other resources you should check out on dynamic landing page content here and here. Good luck setting this up for your landing pages and don’t hesitate to stop by and ask questions!
