Thanks for the insight. More often that not I find that clients are not concerned with landing pages at all, but rather just the actual AdWords campaign.

Recently, I spoke with an AdWords specialist at Google’s Boston office about landing pages. His advice was the same as yours, make sure the landing page is relevant to the search query. This simple piece of advice has really helped me garner more conversions and ultimately a better ROI for my clients. I just wrote an article about landing pages as well:

http://theppcblog.com/2009/11/pay-attention-to-your-landing-pages/

Keep up the good work!

-Matt

This post was mentioned on Twitter by LPJumper: Other than ensuring a highly relevant user journey is delivered, there are no clear rules explicitly stating ho.. http://bit.ly/Futdw...

I tend to run both a brand/category strategy and deep linking product strategy side by side but are really using the category campaigns as a catch all for products terms that we’re not buying or not active or for searchers simply typing in the brand name.

Great idea to actually test one or the other instead.

Just my two cents.

To deep link or not to deep link? Only if you are sure that your links will be there permanently.