Posted on: April 23, 2008
Every PPC marketer needs to have a number of different weapons in their arsenal. Among them, crucial ones are direct linking and landing pages. Even though it has been debated countless times the pros and cons of each one, the bottom line is that you need to have both.
Some campaigns work well with direct linking while others do better with landing pages that are part of a larger site. The main benefit of direct linking is that you can test out quickly (depending on how deep your pockets are) which campaigns will be successful. Once you find a good converter, you can then plan to build a complete site and landing page to promote that offer.
Think of direct linking campaigns as feelers. You should put out new feelers, i.e. new campaigns every now and then so that if one of your campaigns dries up, you'll have others that are ramping up.
I have been doing BOTH as part of my strategy and learning lots from it.
Just as an example, I did a direct linking campaign last week or so. As a result of something that was featured on national TV, this particular key phrase was getting a tremendous spike in the number of searches with practically no competition. The resulting conversion I got was something close to 1 in 3 or 33%.
As a result of running this campaign, I also noticed that after passing a certain threshold in CTR and number of clicks, the minimum bids suddenly dropped by about a factor of 4. Most people dabbling in PPC will not reach this threshold because they don't have the budget to spend that much to really let the campaign run at full speed.
So make sure that you keep learning from testing different types of campaigns and build up experience of what works and what doesn't. Remember that even if you lose money on a campaign, you learn something from it. You learn what doesn't work so that you can look for what works the next time around.
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