Without a doubt after the click-through, the landing page is one of the most important pieces of your PPC puzzle. If you convinced the searcher to click on your link, but fail to deliver what  you promised in the ad on your landing page, you spent that money in vain.

Let’s look at some ads and their corresponding pages, and see if they have the right landing page. Let’s say I was searching for “mickey mouse toaster” (would you believe 6,600 people search for these monthly?), and here is the first PPC ad:

The ad looks good, though if it was me, I’d make it more specific. Once you click on that it takes you to this page (BTW, don’t worry, I copied the link, I didn’t click through from the ad):

WOW! Do you see a Mickey toaster there? I don’t! And I think the conversion rate on this ad is minimal. BTW, I don’t know if you can see this, but the ad was linked to a page that has the search results for “Mickey essentials”: nothing to do with toasters.

The second PPC ad is this:

And the corresponding landing page is this:

While I see a Mickey toaster, I also see a lot of other stuff going on that page. Of course, if you are the merchant, you are probably benefiting in other ways from your PPC campaigns (branding for example), even if you are not making a sale on that specific page. But if you are an affiliate marketer, you want every penny to count, to give you back a sale.

Here is how my landing page would look like, if I was trying to sell Mickey Mouse Toasters ( I did this quickly in less than 10 minutes in my Front Page program). My landing page is simple and to the point.

Are your landing pages cluttered and hard to navigate? Is your advertised product lost in that clutter, wasting you money? Take a few minutes and check your landing pages: make sure they deliver what you promised ion your ad, and that the potential buyer doesn’t have a hard time knowing how to buy the product.