Google AdWords™ For Dummies®, 3rd Edition

Pleasing the Visitor

Perry Marshall of www.perrymarshall.com shares a wallet-walloping calculation that should convince you to spend a lot of quality time working on your landing pages:

Let's say you pay 50 cents for a click, and Barbara in Oregon goes to your website and spends eight seconds seeing what you're selling …then leaves.

50 cents divided by 8 seconds is $225 per hour.

Barbara in Oregon's attention is pretty expensive, wouldn't you say?

Now, maybe Barbara was never your customer. She clicked because your ad aroused her curiosity, or was cute, or implied or promised something for nothing. Oh, well, can't win them all. And, most website owners are told to be satisfied with conversion percentages that are pathetically low: one-half of a percent, one percent. The web is a numbers game, they're told. Get enough traffic, and even a mediocre site can pay the rent.

Well, true, the web is a numbers game, but who says you have to be satisfied with the numbers? The entire premise of AdWords — in fact, the feature that rocketed AdWords into the top spot for search advertising within months of its birth — was the ease with which campaigns could be tested and improved. This improvement doesn't have to stop at the AdWords border with your website. You can deploy the market intelligence you gain by testing keywords and ad copy to create compelling landing pages that continue to attract and guide your best prospects.

In fact, pay per click (PPC) can and should be leveraged into powerful ...