Posted on April 24, 2008
Keep it Crazy Consistent
BY BEN CASTELLI
Turkey sandwich every day for lunch? Consistency can sometimes be pretty boring but when it comes to online advertising, having a consistent message and offer is a key part of decreasing the amount of friction in your marketing process. Having a consistent message is important to increase conversions for all online advertising efforts but let's take a look at pay per click specifically as an example.
Once you have done the research and found a great set of keywords, it's not just enough to bid on the keywords, throw up some ad text and drive the traffic to your home page. Placing the keyword into the ad text and the main headline of the landing page will keep the visitor on the same path to conversion and reduce aggravation. (Having very tight knit ad groups with just a few variations of the same keyword helps here but that is a whole other discussion). Also, don't forget to keep the call to action consistent from PPC ad copy to landing page, this is equally as important.
So here's a decent example of what I am laying down here, I was searching for "web conferencing" the other day:
and the ad that came up - note the keyword in the ad text and a call to action "Free":
and the landing page - note the keyword I searched on and the Free call to action highly prominent above the fold: 
What if you have a ton of keywords and the resources to create only a few landing pages, how do you keep the message consistent? One tactic we recently started testing is to manually tag the keyword destination URLs with a headline containing that keyword. The landing page picks up the tag and dynamically inserts the keyword rich headline into the top of the page. This helps ensure the visitor hears a consistent message and stays on the same path from keyword search to ad display to landing page. 
Oh, and to practice my online marketing consistency, I do eat a turkey sandwich for lunch every day…
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