Search Engine Land published an interesting article about optimizing landing pages for your ads. Landing pages shouldn’t be considered only as a part of your site but also as a part of your ads. Otherwise in most cases ads fail to meet visitor’s expectations and your conversion rate drops.

Yet in many organizations, the way landing pages are actually created and managed is more as if they were part of the site. They’re deployed in the same server environment, someone in IT must plug in any code for tracking or optimization, and the life cycle is processed like any other page of the site. It goes through different hands than the execution of a new search engine ad.

There should be coordination between the people creating the ads and the people creating the landing pages, but there isn’t always as much as there should be.

When landing pages are run this way—more like the site and less like the advertising—a natural drift occurs between what people see in an ad, or the context in which they see it, and what they experience after the click.

This drift happens because the cycle of new ads being created proceeds much faster than the creation and deployment of new landing pages. Companies end up with a large number of varied keywords, vehicles, and ad creatives, but a relatively small number of landing pages.

Get the full story at searchengineland.com