A way around landing pages for high competition programs?

[TomCat99]

Are landing pages necessary with Google Adwords? I have been trying to run an Adwords campaign that links directly to the parent company's site. This is a high competition program so my ads do not show very often for several of my keywords. Are there any pointers that I should be aware of? Should I just start making some landing pages? I am perfectly capable of making landing pages; I just don't know if it will benefit or hurt my efforts. I am worried that the need to get someone to click through two pages...my landing page and then through the parent company’s ad copy will be asking too much. Any expert advice or opinions about weather or not to use landing pages as well as any advice on the creation of landing pages if you feel they are needed would be much appreciated.

[MrSpeed]

This is not expert advice, just my opinion.

One very cool thing about landing pages is that you now have a whole new set of data to examine to determine which keywords are your best.

You may be bidding on the broadmatch term 'widgets'. However you notice in your logs that most people clicking on your ad were actually searching for 'discount widgets'. You can now go back and create another ad group that really targets these new terms.

You will find that not all visitors click through to the merchant. The ones that don't click through probably weren't very interested anyways or they were competitors wanting to see what your landing page looked like.

I'd be curious to hear how overall conversion has been since the advent of landing pages.

[TomCat99]

I am going to start making my own landing pages then. Should I register a new domain name for every landing page I make, or should I just create subdomians on a few of my existing domains to set up the landing pages on? If I register a new domain for every landing page I will need a host that allows multipe domain names on the same account...do you know of any good hosts for the purpose of landing pages?