I’ve been guilty of being somewhat directionless lately. I had previously put together a plan that ended with “start a Google AdWords campaign” but didn’t account for what needed to happen after that. So let’s talk about that.
First, I want to address my website redesign. That’s something that I saw as a prerequisite to starting my AdWords campaign but I got impatient and started the AdWords campaign even though the new site’s not done yet. The ball is still in the designer’s court there.
A rep from Capterra called me the other day and reminded me of something I already knew, but had apparently forgotten: I shouldn’t send PPC visitors to my home page; I should be sending them to landing pages. I had gotten so focused for so long on my home page that I forgot about anything else. Believe it or not, I even read (most of) a whole book called Landing Page Optimization, so suffice it to say that I’m familiar with the idea! The rep even shared a link with me to a landing page for a different industry that she claimed to have “double-digit” conversion rates. The landing page seemed compliant with some of the recommendations I read in Landing Page Optimization, and in violation of other ones. In any case, I judged it to be a good-enough template for me to use. I figure I can kind of paint by numbers by replacing their value prop with mine, their business name with mine, etc. It won’t be perfect but it’ll be an improvement over the nothing I have now. I’m don’t want to build separate landing pages for different keywords yet, just one general landing page. From there I can split it into different ones.
So I think my plan is:
- When the website redesign comes back, implement it
- Build a landing page and point AdWords and Capterra at it
- Set up proper conversion tracking
- Optimize the landing page to reach the conversion goal I previously set (I don’t remember what it is without looking)
- Move to the next step of the funnel and optimize that
- Repeat from #5
Obviously I can’t do #1 right now, but when I can, it’ll be the highest priority. I’ve already started with #2.