After all these years, I’d still say that 90% of advertisers in technical sectors send responders straight to a standard product page (or their home page!) rather than creating a more attractive landing page tailored to the advert. There are so many reasons to go the extra mile that I don’t know where to start, but tying in the advert headline with the landing page is an obvious one. All the evidence shows that a dedicated sales presentation converts to enquiries better than a standard product page.
There are a number of landing page building apps and services around, but it’s only a page, and any decent web designer should be able to knock something up in a couple of hours using a free landing page template. You might even have the ability to do it yourself.
For those who have an internal management nightmare of getting odd items like this put on to their corporate website, have a think about a separate domain for the project. You can get some web space and a free domain name for less than a fiver a month almost anywhere. The advantage of this is that you get a new domain name for the project, which you can quote in print ads to get people to the right page without using a ‘slash something’. Helpfully, this also means you can measure the response.
Here’s a load of ideas to look at. Give it a try. If you’ve got a search advertising campaign going and are already measuring response from a conventional product page, you’ll be able to compare the two approaches directly.