How Landing Pages have transformed PPC traffic
Since the original specification for the world-wide web was drawn up in the 90’s by Peter Berners-Lee there is, remarkably, a ghost still haunting the Internet. It’s called the “HOME” page; we’ve all heard of it, we naturally assume that the page we land on when we click a link is the home page. The Internet has changed and gone are the days of arriving on a web-site looking for an index. We now live in a time poor world where we rely on search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing to serve up good suggestions for where we go to next. They do this by indexing all the pages on the Internet (15 billion at the last count) and offering you one or two suggestions then they sell the rest of the space to companies willing to short-circuit their search algorithm.
These short-cuts, or PPC adverts as the world knows them, are pretty canny – they are often on the right track and in most cases make a fair stab as serving an advert appropriate to the search phrase you used. Ace; and what a business model as it will nett over £20bn in 2010 for Google alone.
One of the neat things about Adwords is that they don’t actually have to go to the home page. No, the advertiser can actually send the visitor anywhere they want. Over the last few years a special approach has evolved around providing neater landing zones for these (paid-for) visitors.
