Pay per click or PPC campaigns are great ways to deliver traffic to your website. However, I have run into too many companies that are getting great traffic but not much business from their campaign. More often than not they are sending all that paid traffic to the homepage of their site. In theory this should work, however, in practice it rarely does.

Your homepage has too many choices

Take a moment and count the number of click choices on your homepage. In some cases, it could be over thirty different places where you can click. If I were to guess, there are about two or three that will lead the visitor to the information that they viewed in your PPC ad. Let’s take a look at why this could be happening.

The first problem is that you are assuming that the visitor will know exactly what you want them to do. Even a big, call-to-action button on the top of the page isn’t always going to work. They may see something that catches their attention and scroll right past the button.

The second problem with sending visitors directly to your homepage is that we all have attention deficit disorder when it comes to websites. So many homepages have things flashing and moving. With so many choices in which to explore, it is the equivalent of letting a child loose in a toy store. They don’t know where to go first. There is a simple way to fix this.

Choose a single, intended action

A better approach is to give the visitor one action. Whether it’s a click, a call or a form, the sole purpose of this approach is to make it easy for the visitor to become a lead or better yet, a customer.

The most efficient way to do this is to send your PPC traffic to a landing page. A landing page will lead the visitor down the funnel to the action you want them to take. This landing page’s sole purpose is to convince the visitor that they need to buy from you. Without using a landing page with your PPC campaign, you’re basically wasting your money. You end up paying for traffic, not for customers.

Keep in mind that your visitor may not be ready to buy. They could be in the exploratory stage. Something to consider is developing a value based lead magnet in conjunction with the landing page. This lead magnet should be educational and informative based on the product or service you are trying to sell. It should provide them an irresistible value in exchange for their email. However, even before you can get their sale or even their email, you have to build trust with the visitor.

Building trust with the visitor

How do you know that you can trust someone? You usually judge them by their actions or what others have said about them. A business is no different.

Nothing annoys me more than a pop-up the second you land on a website. Why should I give you anything? How do I know you won’t spam me to death with stuff I am not interested in? This would be the equivalent of going up to someone randomly in a coffee shop and asking them for their name and email. I’m sure that most will not be willing to do so without knowing why you need it and more importantly, that they can trust you with that information. What makes you think that a person going to your website for the first time will be quick to give up that personal information?

Using social proof on your landing page is another way to help build that trust with the visitor. With every website we build and for that matter, every digital marketing campaign we develop, we incorporate a social proof component to it. Typically the social proof is in the form of customer testimonials or reviews.

Another device to help build that trust is an “I can’t believe they are giving that away” irresistible offer. Again, the idea is that you want to build trust and what better way to build trust than being generous, supplying value, and spreading good will?

Now convert them

Like I mentioned before, you don’t know where the visitor is in their buyer journey and my recommendation is to be prepared for any stage. Typically, if they scroll to the bottom of your landing page there’s a good chance they are, at the very least, interested in what you have to say. Don’t let them leave empty handed.

If they try to leave without converting, stop them, and, to use an overused quote, “make ‘em an offer they can’t refuse”. There are some great applications out there that you can use to time pop-ups. One of the best is Sumo. You can set up a pop-up to appear as they are leaving the page. Give them something valuable for their time on your site in exchange for their email. Once you have their email, you can continue to market to them because now you know a few things about them. You know how to get in touch with them, and you also know that they are interested in your product or service. Keep the education and the value flowing.

Final thoughts

The hardest part of this process is figuring out what you can provide for free to the visitor that they will find valuable enough to give up their email. If you have done your market research correctly, you should know what their pain points are and you can start by giving them solutions that they can incorporate themselves. You want them to react with “Why are you giving this information away?” It’s that kind of generosity that will build trust and over time, build customers.

If you have any questions about this post, feel free to contact me through my AMA link, here, or you can contact me using my messenger bot. I’m always willing to talk. Thanks for sticking around.