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A Question About Creating Unique Landing Pages for Different Traffic Sources:

“If you have a Pay Per Click campaign in Google Adwords for a certain group of keywords, would you make the destination URL of the ad point to an existing page on your website that is already optimized for organic search keywords? Or would you create a whole new page just to send the paid search traffic to?”

Answer:

If the existing landing page is ranking well for a particular set of search phrases organically, it would be safe to say they’d also make good PPC landing pages for those similar keywords. If you wanted to create a separate PPC landing page that is set to “noindex”, you could do that, but it’s easier to just use a good quality, existing landing page instead of having two separate pages.

The advantages to creating separate SEO landing page and PPC landing pages:

  • Gaining more control over which keywords are placed on the page in order to increase the quality score of keywords in an adgroup
  • Don’t have to worry about messing with the organic ranking authority of an established page if tweaks are required

As a side note, you can set up a separate landing page as a part of a split test to see which page gets a better conversion rates. You would create two identical ads in Adwords and send half the traffic to one ad with a certain destination URL and half of the traffic to the other ad with a second destination URL. The winning landing page would have a higher conversion rate in Adwords and you would also be able to easily see the difference in bounce rate, average time on site, and average pages viewed per visit in Google Analytics.

Disadvantages to separating organic and paid search traffic to different landing pages:

  • With the addition of Google+, it might be safer to just use an existing, solid-ranking page as the desitination URL for your PPC ads, because now there is a possible added benefit of having your ad +1’d (searchers can now click the “Plus One” button beside a Google ad to show their online friends that they like a product, service or company.
  • It’s more complicated, thus involving more man-hours to create separate landing pages

5 thoughts on “Having Separate Landing Pages for Organic Search Traffic and Paid Search Traffic”

  1. Scott,

    It was interesting to hear your perspective on this. As you know, I’m not all familiar with PPC as much as you are. This helps me better understand how PPC advertisers view landing pages versus SEO’s.

    -Rachel

  2. Hi Scott,

    If you have the same page for both PPC and SEO, is there a way to determine which traffic source lead to a conversion?

    Cheers,

    James.

    • Hi James. Absolutely. If you have a goal setup in Google Analytics, you can view the source of a conversion easily. Contact me on Skype or reply here to let me know if you’re interested in learning how. I’ll show you.

  3. Thanks for the offer Scott, I just managed to stumble across it earlier though and will be implementing it next week.

    Cheers,

    James.

  4. Hello Scott.

    As I always thought – it’s better to do PPC advertising first for a strartup website to make the website recognized by google. And then – SEO is appropriate. Do you agree?

    Thanks
    Iren

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