Recently on Twitter, in one of my streams, someone posted information relating to information coming from Omniture about online marketing spends. And the data is nothing less than shocking. I had always assumed that people running campaigns without taking on any kind of advice would be shooting themselves in the foot and missing out on good returns on their investment. But the Omniture data suggests that:

“Industry research indicates that for every $92 spent online to acquire site traffic or build awareness, only $1 is spent to proactively convert this traffic,” said Gail Ennis, SVP of Marketing, Omniture. “Advertisers are spending huge sums to get traffic to their sites and we have seen that by focusing on increasing conversion, online marketers can have a tremendous impact on the bottom line.”

How can you not fall into this trap?

It is quite simple really. Often it occurs that people approach our agency wanting to spend copious amounts of money on the actual campaign itself. There is inherently nothing wrong with that, especially when the keywords are highly competitive. But never once when I have mentioned dedicated landing pages has the client immediately taken the idea on board. There is always a struggle explaining (and then actioning) changes that need to be made to the website so the traffic becomes a visitor and a visitor becomes a lead/customer.

So to avoid wasting your online marketing budget, half of the budget should be dedicated to making sure that specialised pages will be created, monitored and optimised throughout the duration of the campaign. This will ensure that every single paid click has the highest possible chance of converting and giving the user exactly what they were after.

But its Only About Traffic Isn’t It?

If I hear that question one more time I am guaranteed to go b-a-n-a-n-a-s. In saying that however, I completely recognise the fact that it is not their fault, but rather a lack of understanding on the Marketers part. They are still stuck in a very 1999 view of the web were user hits and traffic numbers were the only thing that mattered. 10 years on, the Internet has evolved and so has the ability of all those that operate inside it.

The landing page is a key part of any online campaign for all mediums, not just paid search. And it is extremely short sighted not to recognise that at the end of the day, the website does the job of converting, not the click.