Imagine you‘re driving home and see the sign for a dealership. There are lots of nice cars parked outside and since you’ve been considering buying another car for a while, you go in. Turns out the cars outside belong to employees and customers; the dealership only sells tractors and farm machinery. Disappointing, isn’t it?

What does this have to do with e-commerce, you may ask? Landing pages have the same problem. In BP #162, we discuss why visitors should be directed to landing pages rather than homepages and how to optimize the landing page. Message match is one extremely important facet of landing page optimization. Just like the dealership that inadvertently misrepresents itself disappoints a lot of customers and gets them to walk out, failing to to match landing pages with the ads users clicked on to get to your site will earn you a lot of bounces.

The average internet user is bombarded by a ton of brand messaging every minute of every minute of every day. When they click your ad, maintain the same visual elements, color palettes, and even the ad copy is essential in retaining their scant attention. 

Since advertising services like Google charge you for every click on your ads, a prospect bouncing from your landing page due to mismatch will actually be costing you money. You already have a partial conversion, why waste it? If your ad mentions a sale or a free trial, the landing page shouldn’t be geared towards getting prospects to buy at full price.

Consistency between your ads and landing pages also makes it easy for you to perform an analysis on the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns.