AdWords-Specific Sites?

[glengara]

I know many use "special" pages for this, but just wondering if there's a move towards using AdWords-specific sites to concentrate solely on the selling aspects without bothering with the ranking ones.

I'm looking at one situation where it seems the logical step, they want to maintain their organic listings while focusing much more on the selling aspects, and I'm not at all sure this change of focus will impact beneficially on the organics.

[David Wallace]

Why not use landing pages within the same site that you are trying to gain organic search traffic as well? This would still be effective in presenting compelling sales copy and at the same time would not bring about the additional work and cost that running an additional site would require.

[glengara]

*Why not use landing pages within the same site *

Landing pages are the alternative option, they didn't use these in their past AW campaigns, which may well explain the disappointing ROI ;-)

At the moment the site is heavily skewed towards the info side of things, which, IMO, is probably responsible for their better than expected organic listings, and a main concern is not to jeopardise these.

Excluding ranking considerations from the AW/PPC site would give us a free hand both in interlinking the info/commerce sites, and in using some dup info content from the main site to "flesh out" the commerce one.
I'd see it as a "negative" version of the main site, the info would still be there but "down-lighted", the selling/commerce aspects fleshed-out and highlighted.

It's a site I worked with couple of years ago, they're in it for the long-term, don't want to lose their domain, and we're looking at some future tactics, which is where the idea of an AW/PPC specific site comes from ;-)

[huebdoo]

Landing pages (especially combined with A-B testing) is a must when doing any CPC or CPM campaigns.
If you want to quantify and qualify the traffic... good copy in your text ad (constantly tested) as well as a good landing page with calls to action (once again constantly tested) is the way to inner peace and profits

[giubany]

Definately, split testing your landing pages in a constant basis. Will set you apart from your competitors. Also once you have organic search results and PPC campaign under the same keywords, this will increase your CTR due to awareness. :)