Why would you send visitors to a landing page rather than your website with your Google Ads campaign?
At Fourandhalf, we get questions about this every once in a while, and it’s important to understand why you should create an AdWords-specific landing page.
Here are a few good reasons:
Sending AdWords Leads to Your Website is Lazy
Sending people to your website is a lazy way to do your marketing. It would be so easy for Fourandhalf to build a generic ad, point it to your website, and then forget about it. We wouldn’t have to create ads that match Landing Pages, set up special forms and phone numbers; and you wouldn’t know if your campaign was working or not, because the AdWords traffic would be mixed in with everything else.
Landing Pages Help You Track Results
You want to know if your AdWords campaign is doing a good job, and what kind of results you’re getting from your ad. One of the great things about landing pages is that you can track results. You can track what’s going in, what’s coming out, how many people called, and who sent you a form. It’s important. AdWords is expensive.
Landing Pages Help You Target
Websites are good at a lot of things, but they’re not great at closing leads. Landing pages, however, are great at closing. Why? One reason is that they’re targeted. A property management website has to help people with different interests, like existing owners and tenants, and prospective tenants, in addition to the leads you’re targeting with your ad.
The landing page is a single entity there to do one thing – close leads. There are no extras. Visitors won’t have to navigate around vacancy listings and tenant portals. There’s no menu for them to click away to unrelated pages.
The information they find is directly connected to the ad they clicked on. It’s specific and targeted, making it the most effective way to close.
The ability to target also means you can have multiple landing pages; one for each ad you create. Your Atlanta ad should go to an Atlanta landing page and your Marietta ad should go to a Marietta landing page. And if the ad or the page isn’t working, or your needs change, that’s no problem, because
Landing Pages are Easy to Change
Changing a website is time-consuming. Landing pages are designed to be one very specific page, and you can change them around whenever you want.
Test them out, and make adjustments. If you want to change something because you’re getting Section 8 landlords and you want higher income clientele – or maybe the opposite, you can make those changes quickly and easily.
AdWords Traffic Does Not Help Your SEO
If you want extra website traffic, AdWords leads are not the way to get those visitors.
Consider that Google needs to their users to trust them, just like you need your clients to trust you. Businesses get in trouble when they lose that trust. If Google allowed traffic from paid ads to influence SEO, then organic search results would cease to be organic. Here’s what Google says: “Google’s first responsibility is to provide Search users with the most relevant possible results. If businesses were able to pay for higher rankings in the search results, users wouldn’t be getting the information they’re looking for.”
AdWords traffic does NOT count towards your SEO. Anyone telling you differently doesn’t know what they’re talking about, or they’re lying to you to get a sale.
Traffic isn’t as important as leads. Leads bring business.
This is what we focus on at Fourandhalf. It’s why we use landing pages. We’re in good company: Companies in the Property Management space use them all the time, like Trulia and Buildium. Big companies like Amazon and Microsoft use them, too. Why wouldn’t you use them as well?
Landing pages aren’t expensive, and they’re extremely effective.
If you have any questions, please contact us at Fourandhalf.
