What is there to know about first impressions and PPC? How important are they? Before donning your PPC hat, stop for a minute and think about real life first impressions.
First impressions evoke feelings – whether or not those feelings are positive or negative can strongly effect your future interactions with the person or business. The same principal holds true in PPC.
Imagine this scenario. You have an appointment to meet with a new accountant. When you arrive at the office you find no receptionist and there are four doors off the waiting area. There are no signs indicating which office belongs to which accountant. How do you know on which door to knock? How does it feel not finding what you expected?
Fortunately this doesn’t usually happen in the real world and it shouldn’t happen on your landing pages either. In dealing with face-to-face interactions with companies, you probably don’t realize how quickly opinions are formed.
If you were to enter an office as described above, how long would you stick around before you left? The MarketingSherpa’s Landing Page Handbook states you have between 2 – 8 seconds to convince your audience not to leave. Further from MarketingSherpa’s Landing Page Handbook:
“Many visitors … come via routes that bypass the homepage, the landing page is the only touch they’ve had with your company. More than any other factor, design can influence their immediate, visceral impression.”
This being the case, you’d better make sure that the landing page for each of your PPC Ads gives the potential client the impression you want them to get.
When that potential client walks in your virtual door by landing on your page, give them the reception they are expecting. Don’t make them go looking for what they came to find. For better or for worse, you’ll find their first impression of your company will last.