The rate of change online used to be fun. Chasing the cutting 
edge was an exciting occupation with limited accountability. 
But now ROI, quarterly budgets, and the need to grow sales AND 
profits have replaced the cutting edge as the object of our 
efforts. Yet despite the transition to more traditional business 
goals and outcomes, the rate change remains the same. 

Take keyword buys. This is still a relatively new phenomena, 
and many businesses are only just beginning to develop an 
approach to extract the benefits. Nevertheless returns have 
already been compressed as the cost of key words has quickly 
been bid up to their marginal rates of return - and in some 
case beyond. The ease with which results can be tracked has 
allowed the market to be extremely efficient in pricing 
keywords, making it harder and harder for the buyers of 
words to generate a return. 

Pockets of gold still exist. Keywords that have been overlooked 
by competitors can still produce outsized returns. But these 
pockets will only shrink over time as more buyers enter the 
market chasing the same end customers. 

To continue to extract value from keywords, marketers are going 
to have to turn inward. For most companies, getting the traffic 
is seen as the whole of the equation. But just as important is 
what you do with the traffic. So even as we are only starting 
to get the hang of keyword buys, we need to tackle landing page 
optimization. 

To date, landing page optimization has been too hard and too 
expensive to generate a return. But with the returns on keywords 
contracting and the advent of new optimization tools, the math 
behind such efforts looks better everyday.

To date, most companies purchasing keywords have to settle with 
dropping a potential customer off at the home page. In some 
cases, they can send them to a category level page or to a 
particular product page. Going beyond this to a more customized 
landing page that better matches the keyword is simply too 
taxing in terms of time, people, and money. Simply getting the 
requisite page changes through IT is often a sufficient barrier 
in and of itself.

But solutions exist for these problems. Services like Offermatica
( http://www.offermatica.com ) from Fort Point and Optimost 
( http://www.optimost.com ) offer tools that allow marketers and 
merchants to cost-effectively manipulate a page to reflect any 
number of necessary variants. Now a home page can show language 
and featured products that clearly tie to the keyword that 
brought a potential customer to the site. Even product level 
pages can be improved, be it through highlighting particularly 
relevant product features, adjusting pricing and promotion, or 
showing related products -- all of which tie back to the source 
keyword.

In the case of Offermatica, the tool works as a hosted 
application. Portions of a page are defined as "mBoxes" that 
are then filled based on the keyword source. The content can 
be anything you would normally put on a web page - text, 
images, links, forms, etc. Because it is a hosted application, 
it bypasses the need for internal IT while providing the 
responsiveness needed to keep up with rapidly changing marketing 
requirements. And best of all, both Offermatica and Optimost are 
priced as a service - eliminating both difficulty and cost as an 
excuse for doing nothing.

Keywords - at least the ones that work - are not going to get any 
cheaper. They will remain a valuable tool for driving qualified 
traffic. But increasingly buying the right ones will only be the 
first step. Generating a return on the resulting traffic through 
landing page optimization will be the key to continuing to 
generate positive returns.