Search landing pages - marketing budget wasted?

A great article about paid advertising on search engine results pages by Jared Spool. Pretty obvious points I would have thought, but from the examples listed it appears not. In the quest to spend the marketing budget, consideration of the user experience seems to go out of the window sometimes...



Using paid advertising slots in Google search results, or on any site for that matter, is only worthwhile if your landing page lives up to the promise of the ad. If they don't then it's a paid-for click wasted. When we're searching this is most acute.

In fact, as I read this I realised I'd just seen a unit at the University of Edinburgh do exactly the same thing via Facebook just this week. The ad in my sidebar offered one thing, but the landing page I was taken to presented something related but fundamentally different.

I'd love to see the analytics for this campaign as my instinct is that most visitors would abandon immediately. If you're going to the expense of paying for visitors, why not bring them to the site honestly and then talk to them directly rather than dumping them on a homepage?

Three Perils with Search Landing Pages - article by Jared Spool for uie.com