Do your Google Adwords ads, banner ads, e-mail marketing campaigns, etc. point your visitor to your homepage?  If so, you need to read this blog post.

It’s important to have continuity between your ads and the page visitors first enter your site.  We’ve all clicked on ads that promoted a specific product or a special offer only to be driven to the company’s homepage that has no mention of that offer or product.  It’s frustrating and most people won’t take the time to search the site for what the advertisement was promoting.  Why spend money marketing your product and service only to frustrate and turn away potential customers?  Building continuity between your ad campaigns and your landing pages will increase your online sales conversion.

Here’s a good example of lack of continuity, which will usually result in a lower sales conversion rate.  I did a search on Google for “Angels baseball t-shirt”, and a number of paid keyword ads showed up with some reference to Angels t-shirts in the ad copy.  However, a few of the ads I clicked simply brought me to the t-shirt company’s homepage.  In order to find any Angels t-shirts, I would have had to navigate my way through their site.  It was easier to go back to Google and find a link that brought me directly to what I was looking for, which is what I ended up doing.  These sites lost a major opportunity to make a sale.  Not to mention it was a waste of their marketing dollars.

To optimize your chance of converting a visitor into a customer, create a landing page for the related keywords you are buying.  In the above example, a great landing page would have been one that specifically listed the Angels t-shirts that were in stock and perhaps highlighted the newest and best selling Angels shirts.  Better yet, if the landing page had a special offer such as free shipping for purchases made today, it would have been more compelling and increased the chance of converting me from a visitor to a customer.

To increase your website conversion rate even further, institute direct marketing tactics to write compelling sales copy for your landing pages.  A powerful headline and compelling copy, can make huge differences in your online sales.  I’ll write in more detail about this in future blog posts.  In the meantime, check out my friend Robert Stover’s copywriting blog – Copy Ideas (http://www.copyideas.com/archives/).  He is an expert copywriter and has some great resources on his site to help you improve your website copy.