In the Internet Marketing Bible for Accountants, one of the biggest chapters in the book is regarding Google AdWords.  Used effectively, they can quickly drive perfectly targeted customers to your business in a cost-effective manner.  Used incorrectly, however, and you’ll burn through a lot of cash  quickly with  little to show for your efforts.

As well as writing a good ad, it’s vital that the ‘landing page’ – the page that the ad leads to – is well-optimized.  Too many advertisers take the lazy approach and send everyone through to their home page.  But those who take the trouble to create a specific page which gives the visitor exactly what they are looking for will be rewarded in two different ways:

1.  Google rewards good and relevant pages by reducing the cost of the AdWords leading to that page.
2.  More potential clients are going to take the action that you want them to take and so your conversion rates are going to be higher.

Already a very important part of Google’s secret formula for ranking AdWords,  the quality of landing pages became even more important following the latest change in Google’s algorithm a couple of weeks ago.

SearchEngineLand has an excellent blog entry containing seven useful tips for increasing conversion rates of landing pages.  Some of them are not too surprising (such as the fact that people are less likely to complete forms which ask for too much information), but a few of them offer food for thought.

For example, I was surprised to read that a simple line beneath forms saying, “We respect your privacy” had an impact on the number of people completing the forms – I thought that most people could tell the difference between a legitimate site and a spammy one by now.  But I stand corrected.

I also liked the information that bigger sign-up buttons led to more click throughs – simple advice, but it’s little gems of information like this which can have an enormous impact on the success of internet marketing campaigns.  How much more successful would your advertising be if you could double your conversion rate?

Read the full list of seven useful tips here.