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Now this just seems ridiculous does it not?  Why would anyone ever do such a thing?  Surely no one is going to buy traffic, pay good money for it and then send people to a web page that is NOT ABOUT what they are advertising!  

That could never ever happen or could it?  

Oh it happens each and every day.  I decided to do a little experiment to see what I could show you in regard to this mistake and illustrate for you exactly how big of a mistake this really is.  I decided to look at some jewelry sites for a few reasons.  

First - Even though as I write this line I have not yet even looked one up I am almost sure in a market like jewelry many people are paying for traffic and sending it to the wrong place.  You wouldn’t want to lay down a bet with me on this would you?  

Second – Given Jewelry is expensive, I am writing this a few days before valentines day and competition is high I am positive that the bids for PPC traffic are very high and I can show you that not only are these bidders wasting money but they are wasting a ton of money.  

Third – I don’t know ANYTHING about jewelry!  I mean nothing other then I know what I like when I see it.  So I don’t have any special insider knowledge and I can honestly describe this as a pure marketer to you.  

Ok so what I am going to do is go to Yahoo and look up a jewelry term, show you where it points and then where they should point. I am then going to let you know how much that the individual is paying to send their traffic to the wrong place.  

Again I still have not yet done a search, this is going to be interesting isn’t it?  

So thinking of my wife I know she likes jewelry and I have paid attention to what TV ads get her attention and what she glances at in the stores.  (Um guys you can learn from me on this one too).  So I know she likes and would like to add to her collection…  

A three stone pendant  

Tanzanite earrings  

and a

A diamond solitaire pendent  

So that gives me three terms with which to make my point and show you a marketer spending a lot of money to waste traffic and send it to the wrong place.  

Ok so I am off to do my searches and I will be right back.  You want to bet that I won’t have to go past three stone pendent to prove my point?  I will give you 10 to one odds. (grin)  

Ok so I am back and the top 3 bidders were MSN Shopping, Bizrate and Amazon.  These are big boys who hire professionals with giant stores and they all have a three stone pendant page when I click on their ads.  

Now never mind that both MSN and Bizrate show really ugly pendants at the top of the page and have the pretty diamond ones everyone wants so low on the page I have to scroll to see them.  At least they got it right to a degree!  

But at result number four of the paid results I found an ad that read  

So where did this ad take me to when I clicked on it?  Strait to www.netaya.com now go look at that page, you will see it is the home page and no where on it do you see a three stone pendant.  If you scroll down you will find an amethyst one but if you search for three stone pendant you probably want see a page with a selection of them when you click through.  

I found this page on their site by digging around.  http://netaya.com/3stonependaprogr.html  (it took me 4 clicks to find it and I am a professional internet marketer and knew exactly where to look, not just Joe Shopper so keep that in mind), now go look at the pendant page again it is http://netaya.com/3stonependaprogr.html  

Now tell me if you wanted a three stone pendant which page would make you more likely to take a good look.  The home page or the one actually about three stone pendants.  I promise you just changing the landing page would probably increase this marketer’s conversion by two to three times what it is now.  

The next thing I did was use the Overture View Bids Tool and find out how much Netaya was paying to send traffic to the wrong place.   

Are you ready for this?  

At the time I wrote this Netaya was paying 59 cents a click to send visitors to the wrong place!  So 1000 visitors sent to the wrong place is costing them $590.00!   

Below is a screen shot of their bid on overture for the term "three stone pendant"

Why are they doing this?  

Most likely because as simple as this concept is, it escapes most people!  Now I can and (and probably will) write an entire book some day on landing page optimization but for now just get this basic fact down.  When you advertise be it online or offline always direct your visitors to a page that is about exactly what you are advertising.   

Now will this take more work when you set up your PPC campaigns?   

Yes.  Yet not that much more work.  In the example above the right landing page already exists the marketer simply needs to point the ad to it!  This requires creating an ad group just for three stone pendants and terms associated with them.  That will add a few minutes to the set up time but the return will be huge.  

Remember when a web surfer searches for a term they are looking for exactly what they typed, I know it might sound overly simple but if you give them that your results will be at least twice as good.  

So what have we learned today?  

First, send your visitors to a page that give them EXACTLY what they are looking for.  

Second, never take a bet from me when it relates to internet marketing!   

~ Jack Spirko

Special Announcement  

If you have been keeping track I promised this series would have eight lessons in it and we have now published all eight but during the writing of this course I realized that there were four more critical errors that most marketers make.  

Errors that are so costly I simply could not leave them out.

So I have added four more lessons that we will publish over the next four days.  Also there is going to be a special free bonus gift after that one.  I hope this alone teaches you one more fundamental of doing business, “Always try to give people more then you promised them”.

Technorati Tags: adwords, ppc, internet marketing, landing page, page optimization, online advertising, paid search, pay per click, cost per click, advertising, marketing, seo, sem

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