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eliquid
( Jason Brown )
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- May 29, 2013
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Can I ask your opinion on landing pages, I'm running a PPC campaign for my employer, a large car dealer, I'm bidding on used car search terms and sending traffic to the used car results page relating to the search term the user used for example if someone searches on Google for 'used ford fiesta for sale' they would be sent to a page listing all our used Ford Fiesta stock. I read on a PPC blog that I should be using a custom landing page, what's your thoughts on this, it's a bit tricky for a car dealer with lots of various makes and models.
I'm kind of wondering about this too for the car industry. For example, landing pages have always been easy for me when generating leads for things like plumbing, email services, and some ecommerce products. But I too am kind of confused about the car industry.
My assumption has always been that the landing pages for the auto industry are more like templates with scripts that dynamcially change content based search query, kind of like Unbounce's dynamic keyword insertion features. For example, if I search used honda civic 2007 in philadelphia pa then it's pretty easy to change all of that content dynamically. In fact, I saw cars.com dong something like this awhile back. They would even match the BG image to the search query (for the most part). But maybe I have been wrong all of this time. So I'd also love to hear more about this.
On another note about landing pages, awhile back one of my ppc managers sent me a weekly report for the wrong client. It was an ecomm store in the sun tan lotion niche. The store was doing making 100's of thousands of $$ per week and they were just sending traffic straight to the shopify home page. It kind of blew my mind to see that they weren't doing anything with dedicated landing pages.
With inventory like cars that can move daily and not get replenished ( like stock in a shopify store ) with the same model, this would be the best way to handle it, by making a page for the models instead of the indiv cars.
What you are trying to do is make the page relevant to the query. So if someone types in "ford fiesta for sale" and they hit your page that lists 10 of them instead of just 1 specific one ( by VIN ), then you would be fine.
Also, there will be times when you just have 1 ford fiesta for sale and not get another one in for 10 months. As a large car dealer, I wouldn't spend time manually creating a LP and AD for 1 car that might sell today and never be back in stock. Not unless you have automated software to do this that can build the page, build the ad, insert it into Adwords, and then take down the page AND take the ad down when the car is marked as sold so you don't have to manually do it. I get that selling the car can be a lot of money, but if you have several models like this its a lot of work daily to keep track of and do.
As far as the suntan lotion stuff... Could the report have been reporting/covering more than Adwords when it came to sales? I've seen a few agencies that handle Adwords for clients, but they build reports for Amazon, Adwords, eBay and other channels for the client when it comes to revenue even though the agency doesn't manage those channels. If so, this could be throwing you off.
Sometimes hitting Page X ( like the home page or default product page ) is enough to get good sales with Adwords.
It's doesn't mean its the best, most ROI, or least expensive. It just means the owner is making money.
If a bottle of suntan lotion costs $0.15 to make and you sell it for $20.. and your poorly written ad, poorly done LP and Quality Score of 3 makes you have a cost per click of $1.. well you might be able to spend $15 at those metrics, make a sale, and be happy with that ( maybe ). Mostly because not only did you score $5 as profit ( miserable I think ), but you got the customers email and got them on remarketing too to sell them more later. You might have also upsold or cross sold them in the checkout funnel.
While you only made $5 on the direct transaction, your LTV on that customer might average $34 instead of $5. It very well might end up at $107 for LTV.
Someone at the agency or business might realize that and think this campaign is awesome. $15 spend in ads for $34 or $107 LTV.
Remember, this is with poor ads and LPs and a bad Quality Score.
Since everyone thinks this is good, no one is going in to bother with making a better ad or a better LP to raise the Quality Score. Things are fine "as-is" for the owner/company. The agency doesn't bring it up because their customer is happy.
Someone could go in and tweaks things to get the $15 ad spend down to $5 and save them $10, but they probably aren't because they could also screw things up too in the process and then the agency could lose a happy paying client.
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