Stop Sending Ad Traffic to Your Homepage with Val Riley, VP of Marketing at Unbounce

Welcome back to another episode of the Marketing Millennials podcast.

Today, I have Val Riley, VP of Marketing at Unbounce, and we are gonna talk landing pages because we love landing pages here.

Um, but I want Val to go into how she got into marketing, um, to set up the conversation.

So hey, Val, welcome to the podcast.

Hey, thank you so much for having me.

Uh, really looking forward to chatting today.

Um, so how does one get into a career in marketing? Sometimes it feels like people come from all over to be in marketing, but I actually was an advertising major and kinda, um, started there.

So I knew I had interest in media, knew I had interest in ads, and then, um, I realized pretty quickly out of college that my ability to write was something that differentiated me from other folks.

And so content marketing is what really drew me in and how I started my path into, into marketing, um, through content.

That's amazing.

I mean, I kind of had the same thing where my mom w- had a marketing mind, but I wanted to test out in college if I actually had a marketing mind.

And I, but a lot...

It's crazy 'cause a lot of people don't go down the path and they'll be like, "Hey, I know I want to get into ad- um, advertising or marketing." So that's really cool.

But I wanna get into this conversation, and I wanna start with, like, one of the most important things that I think marketers should be thinking about.

And we talked about this before, but Google launched an update.

They always launch updates, so it's hard to, like, keep track.

But, um, explain why this update is important for marketers to n- to know and how it can affect their advertising.

Yeah.

You know, I think at this point we'd be wise to their game, but Google just drops stuff, and then sometimes there's big fanfare and sometimes there isn't.

And this one was super interesting, Daniel, because it dropped in February.

It was pretty quiet, and you really didn't get a lot of buzz around it.

But essentially, um, it was an ad quality update, but what it really talked about was, um, emphasizing landing page quality.

And it basically said, if your landing page doesn't have relevance, meaning how closely that destination page aligns with search intent, and it doesn't have...

it isn't easily navigable, um, then there's a good chance they're not gonna serve up your ad.

And, you know, that's pretty huge.