Tying an online ad or piece of email marketing directly to a customized landing page that acknowledges the initial communication and has a specific call to action can improve lift by 40%, according to a survey by CrownPeak.
Despite the importance of linking to relevant pages, however, the survey revealed that a majority of marketers still do not take the basic step to link their online ads or emails with relevant landing pages, and are missing out on a wealth of post-click analytical data, not to mention sales, reports MarketingVOX.
The recently-released “Holiday PPC Ad Strategies” study found that 66% of this year’s holiday-themed online search advertising drives traffic to a home page or some other landing page that is not obviously tied to the online ad, and confuses and/or annoys potential shoppers. Only 34% of the holiday-themed search-engine ads analyzed in the study directed traffic to specific landing pages that urged shoppers to buy, or were otherwise reflective of the original ad.
Campaigns Not Linked
As part of the research, CrownPeak analyzed search marketing results across 10 different holiday-themed phrases, including general themes such as “holiday deals” and “holiday gifts; specific products such as “Nintendo Wii” or “Elmo Live”; and product categories such as “Halloween costumes” and “Christmas decorations.” Individual ads were analyzed from more than 100 online marketers, all of which used Google Adwords to disseminate campaigns. Advertisers were assessed over a period of two weeks.
The study found that the majority of online ad campaigns and web content were not linked. Of the 66% of advertisers that did not tie specific, relevant landing pages to their search ad, nearly 13% went to the advertiser home page. The remainder sent traffic to general category pages, or canned “searches” that didn’t specifically play off of the advertising copy.
Additional study findings:
- Product-specific advertising performed better than its holiday-themed counterpart, though many retailers still failed to direct the majority of ads to a clear consumer call to action.
- 50% of product-specific advertisements linked either to a canned “search” or “category” page, or the website home page.
- Some advertisers – primarily content aggregators – directed ads to specific landing pages, which then featured advertisements for other providers of the product.
Amazon, Target Best Scores
Ecommerce retailers were the winners in the race to tie marketing ads and landing page relevance, Crown Peak reported.? When looking specifically at Ecommerce sites, 54% of advertisers had content-specific landing pages paying off a click from a search ad.
Amazon and Target – which also were two of the most-visited Black Friday retail websites – were among the highest scoring advertisers overall, consistently driving consumers to landing pages for products they were seeking.
“The goal of our study was to determine how smart holiday marketers are being with their online PPC spend, and the results were surprising,” said Jim Howard, CEO of CrownPeak. “By driving traffic to irrelevant content or the company’s home page, marketers are virtually guaranteeing that they aren’t going to convert Web visitors to buyers through online ads.”
