In this post I’m going to tell you why you shouldn’t be sending any paid traffic to your home page, whether we’re talking about PPC and Google Ads, Facebook Ads or any other ads.
Sending ad traffic to your home page is still a very common practice, and if you are new to running ads it might seem like the obvious thing to do. Just send people to the website. Unfortunately, a lot of marketers who should know better also do it.
Here’s something you need to consider:
The point of the ad is to get people onto your website, and the point of your website is to get people to contact you.
When people are searching for something on Google, they are usually searching for something specific. If you send them to your home page, you are throwing everything at them and basically saying here, find what you need.
What’s going to happen is they will quickly scroll through the home page, and if they don’t immediately see what they are looking for, they will leave.
Imagine there’s a hardware store and you are looking for a particular type of hammer. You have to go into the store, look around, find the tools section, find the hammer isle, then look through all the hammers. Then you might not even find the hammer you are looking for.
Now right next door there’s a small shop that only sells hammers. You walk right in and exactly what you need is right there in front of you. Not only was it quicker for you to find what you were looking for, but the whole experience was much better.
That’s essentially the same thing when you send people to your home page versus a page made specifically on the topic of the ad.
You should be doing this with every specific topic your ads are about. So if you have ads for conveyancing, send them to a conveyancing page. Family law, send them to a family law page. Litigation, send them to a litigation page.
This is the same whether you are doing Google Ads, PPC, Facebook ads, or any other kind of ad. You results will increase dramatically if you do this.
The only exception to this is if you offer one very specific service. Say you are just starting up and you only do conveyancing, you could make your home page a landing page that specifically talks about conveyancing, and run ads to that.
That can be an effective way to get the business of the ground and get things rolling. I have done that before when it was necessary and it has worked. But that’s really the only exception to this.