How Deep Do You Link... Landing pages for Adwords

[realityhack]

I am wondering what experience others have with deep linking vs. 'shallow' linking from PPC ads.

My company sells... um... widgets. The site is structured so you can find the particular type and size of widget very easily.

A lot of material suggests deep linking for maximum conversion rate. So if the person searches for K-Widgets I would link to the K-Widget page not the overall catalog page. This removes a click and the user is (presumably) put in front of what they want.

Interestingly I have not found this to be a particularly successful strategy for me. I suspect that deep linking to 'K-Widgets' means people miss seeing that we carry all those other kinds of widgets and are thus, not impressed and don't convert as well.
My tests in the past showed deep linking at best had no real effect on conversion rate.

Does anyone have experience with testing this?
Do you find that deep linking works for specific 'levels' of search (say it works for very VERY specific searches, but not for somewhat specific searches)?

[Kevin H]

Strangely enough (outside my normal work) I've just been testing this for the last few weeks.

While I'm not going to say that my test results would be the same for everyone they do bear out your findings; so long as it's no further away that 1 click (ie the category page) than the 'original' landing pages.

The conversion rates via the search terms have remained remarkably steady.
HOWEVER, what has converted has changed slightly. There were less conversions on the products that I was orginally targetting BUT MORE conversions on other 'widgets'.

What I'm not working on is to try and work out to better 'push' the conversions to the 'better ROI' items.

In other words, if the original 'conersion' page has the better ROI then keep them going there.
If the 'original' conversion page has lower ROI, but the conversion rate stays the same when landing people on the category page, then put them there and hope they 'up-sell'.

Lots of work to determine which key-phrases etc do better where now