If you run PPC marketing campaigns, landing pages are critical to your success. If your landing page sucks, you will waste a lot of money on advertising without seeing any significant conversions. Therefore it is extremely critical to get the landing pages designed properly. DO NOT use one template for all your different offers and campaigns. What works on one offer is a dead end on another. Work with a custom landing page for each and every offer.
Keep it simple, stupid. “KISS” is still working and probably always will. Don’t go overboard on your landing pages. Make sure the visitor can understand what you are offering and does not get confused. Be extremely focused on the topic and don’t waste valuable space on items that have nothing to do with your offer. Make clever use of paragraphs and bullet points. Explain why a visitor should take action.
Speaking of taking action. Offer multiple calls to action. Don’t assume the visitor knows where to go. Your landing page has several functions. One is to explain why the visitor needs your product and once convinced you need to take the visitor’s hand and guide her to the “click me to buy” button. Use a fair mix of text links and buttons. Flash or animated GIF buttons can help to draw the attention to the “take action now” part.
Let the visitor know where she is. Provide the necessary value to gain trust. Trust is needed to get sold on your offer and to take action. If the landing page does not tell the visitor why she is on your site, she will click back to the search results. Your PPC ads needs to be continued on your landing page. This will create a chain the visitor can follow and understand. Don’t get tricky with your landing page. Don’t hijack the visitor. If the back button frightens you because you lose a visitor, your problems are much bigger than you can anticipate. It is also against most PPC search engine’s Terms of Service. Using shady tactics to keep a visitor on your page is a big no no.
Link tracking is important. Every call to action link or button should carry a subID you can track. Why? Well, you kind of wanna know if it is the button in the middle of the page that brings the converting visitor. If you never receive a click on a specific link and that link also does not show conversions, what’s the point of keeping it. Rather use the real estate on your page to show another benefit.
You heard it before – do split testing. Test different versions of your landing pages. Why? Well, you might be missing out on a large number of conversions. The same way you test drive a new vehicle you are interested in, the same way you should evaluate the performance of your landing pages. I admit this is a difficult task that often comes with an extra price tag, but don’t skip this task for too long. Have your landing pages reviewed by non-Internet Marketeers. First of all chances are extremely low that those people “steal” your idea and second you might get extremely valuable insight from a “normal consumer” perspective.
Also make sure to spend enough time testing. A one day test with 30 visitors will not speak a clear language. I know, you will be craving for conversions and any hint makes you want to ditch that one landing page and use the other one, but make sure to have a few hundred clicks go through every landing page to make conclusions. You are also not limited to 2 different landing pages. Feel free to mix more into the rotation if needed.
I admit I am not always following the advice I am giving here. I make the same “lazy marketeer” mistakes like many other folks. It takes some discipline to pull this through. The one thing I learned is that the more you can stick to rules like these, the more successful you will be with PPC Advertising. Good Luck.
Related posts: