Mike Mancini with PPC Video Training.com. Today we’re starting a new video series called “PPC Ads Best Practices.” The first video is about, never ever point your PPC ads here.

So, where is here? Well, let’s take a look at an example.

This is an image of the home page of a pest control company. They’re driving paid traffic to secure new clients with free estimates and offering specific pest removal services. They are doing this specifically for lead generation.

So in this instance, they would NEVER drive paid traffic to their home page. And a lot of you are probably asking “Why not?”

When we start reviewing campaigns where someone else has been running it, or the client set it up and may not have had much PPC experience, we see this happen a lot.

When you’re running PPC ads to a home page, you’re giving the visitor too much to look at. In the image, there is information about the pest control company and there is a form there as well. However, there are also a bunch of links that will take the person off of that particular page.

There are just too many distractions.

Don’t Distract Me!You want that visitor to do one of three things. You want them to fill out a form (lead generation), you want them to call your phone number on the page (also lead generation), or you want that visitor to leave.

If they leave, it’s because they’re not a qualified and you really don’t want to waste your time with that person. You have a website to get business. You want to talk to those qualified “Good” leads.

So you want them to either fill out a form, or you want them to call.

The problem when you drive that traffic to a home page is that there is typically a lot going on with a website home page. And all of those links can take the attention off of what you want that visitor to do.

As they start looking around the page and start clicking on other links, they are doing everything but what you WANT them to do.

You want to remove all of that extra temptation.

Where Should I Point My Pay Per Click Ads?

Now, here’s a sample landing page for a pest control service. This is exactly the type of landing page that you want to drive traffic to.

You can see right away that there’s no navigation bar at the top of the page. You’re not giving someone that option to go looking around the website and click on something else.

At the top, you have a clear call to action. Call us today with a phone number (a tracking phone number). You want to be able to track those phone calls.

On this page, they can either call or fill the form out. Sure, there is a little bit of information about the company, a bit more about you below that, some testimonials a bit further down with another call to action at the bottom of the page.

Keep Them FocusedBut to be perfectly honest. Most people never even get below the fold (what loaded on the screen immediately and you don’t have to scroll down).

They see that it’s a pest control service. And typically we have our landing pages set up where if they were looking for mouse removal, we would change the title of the page to mouse removal and would change the picture to that of a mouse.

So we have several landing pages for the different pests set up and each PPC ad would drive specific traffic to each landing page. Ads for wasp removal, mice, bees, termites, and so on would drive traffic to each pest specific landing page.

But this one is just a general pest control page with a logo and some calls to action. Of course you can set these landing pages up with your own color scheme. This was just a quick example that we set up.

But you’re getting someone to call, to fill out that form or if they’re not a qualified lead, they’re going to leave. But we’re only driving very qualified search traffic to this particular landing page.

So, that’s the first lesson. Never, ever point your PPC ads to your home page. Always point them to a landing page to keep them focused on exactly what you want them to do. Fill out a form, make a phone call, download a white paper, whatever you want them to do.

All right! We’ll see you next time.

Thanks for reading: Never Point Your PPC Ads Here