Why are landing pages so important?
You'll need to understand what the purpose of a landing page is to really get why landing pages are important and what makes a landing page convert.
Imagine your house got on MTV Cribs... or for the youngsters who don't get the reference, imagine someone asked for a tour of your home.
Would you:
- Let them wander around your home alone?
- Take them on a guided tour?
I'd personally take them on a guided tour, making sure to pass over things like the laundry room (my wife keeps the cat's litter box in there... and it stinks).
Organic traffic (from SEO) gets the "unguided" tour since you can't always control what page they start on. Landing Pages, on the other hand, are like the "guided" tour.
They walk the visitor through your most important selling points, remove exit points like navigation links, and (should) focus on a single call to action.
Excellent PPC management requires lead capture pages or destination pages that provide the visitor exactly what they want and convince them to take action immediately.
Using a great landing page can:
- Increase your conversion rates by... ALOT
- Improve your Google Ads Quality Scores
- Help track individual campaign performance
Sometimes, a great landing page is all it takes to make a lead generation campaign successful. In fact, we've implemented landing pages for clients that immediately 10x their conversion rates.
Hopefully, you get it now, landing pages are essential. They increase your conversions, improve quality scores, and can give you a competitive edge.
So, How Can You Increase Your Landing Page Conversion Rate?
Define A Clear Call To Action
What do you want the visitor to do? I mean... What is the ONE MOST IMPORTANT THING you want them to do? Having a clear call to action is the first step to an optimized landing page. So when planning your new lead capture page, start with the end goal in mind.
Do you want the visitor to:
- Call Your Business Now?
- Fill Out A Contact Form?
- Signup for an email newsletter?
- Download a lead magnet or make a purchase?
In other words, what action do you want the user to take?
Your landing pages should focus on a single action, so don't try to get them to signup on your newsletter, call the business, follow you on Facebook and purchase something all at one time. You'll likely overwhelm the visitor and increase your bounce rate.
Whatever you choose, it’s critical your Call To Action is clear, concise, and matches the messaging that brought them to your landing page in the first place.
Take a look at the example below.
They have so many CTAs we are still unsure what to do, or what they even want us to do.
Now, take a look at this landing page.
I'll admit, their form is super long, but that's not always a bad thing. In fact, longer forms can help increase your lead quality and dial in your campaigns. More importantly, the Microsoft landing page example above clearly states what the benefit is "improve your team's mobile productivity" and has a single call to action of "Download Now"
If you are spending anything on PPC advertising you'll need to do all of this and more to remain competitive.
Match Landing Pages with User Intent
Imagine clicking on an ad about dental implants and then being taken to the homepage of a dental website. You'll have to then click around the website and find what you were actually looking for. This results in a higher bounce rate, poor user experience, and ultimately lower conversion rates.
Instead, when someone clicks a dental implant ad, they should be taken to a dental landing page with dental implant information and specials to capture the lead.
People are more likely to take action when the experience on your landing page matches the intent of their search.
Make sure your PPC Management Company creates custom landing pages for your campaigns. If they don't, contact us and we will help!
Use Copy That Converts, Not Informs
You have plenty of places on your website to talk about yourself or your business, your landing page shouldn't be one of them.
Instead, your landing page should focus on what the visitor is going to get out of taking the action you want. What are the benefits, how will it solve their problem, how will it make their life easier?
Your goal should be getting the visitor to imagine their life with your product or service, once you have done that... you got them.
Talk About Your Customer (not yourself)
Face it, people only care about themselves. This fact goes deep down to a psychological level, to a point people get turned off when they see words like We, I, Me, Us, etc.
So avoid talking about yourself and make it about the customer.
Instead, use words like YOU to address their problems and show you understand their pain points by speaking directly to them.
- Evoke a sense of urgency or scarcity: When we feel a resource is scarce, we’re willing to do more to obtain it. That’s why phrases like, ‘Limited Time Only’ or ‘While Supplies Last’ influence action.
- Use simple, clear language: Consumers are impatient, easily distracted, and for the most part... Uneducated. So it's best to keep your landing page copy at a 6th grade reading level (or lower).
- Include just the essentials: Short attention spans lead to skimming webpages, so your landing page should only include information that supports your call to action.
Landing Page Speed Matters
According to Google, more than half of all website visitors will leave after 3 seconds of load time. In other words, if it takes more than 3 seconds for your landing page to load, you’re losing half your potential leads.
On top of that, every additional second delay in load time results in another 20% decrease in conversion rate.
So if you don't optimize your page load times, you might as well burn your money (or donate it) instead of wasting it on paid ads.
To optimize your landing page speed you'll need to perform tasks like image compression, implement page cache, minify your JS and CSS, and most importantly choose a fast hosting provider.
Hosting isn't all created equal, here's a chart of average response times from popular hosting providers.
Test, Optimize, Repeat
A great landing page is one that is always being tested & optimized. Soo...Test everything! And don't assume that YOU know best. A/B testing takes biases off the table and lets data lead the way.
When a/b testing your landing pages, you might discover that the headline you thought was ‘perfect’ wasn’t all that great, and the one you thought sucked is actually the winner. So test fast, and optimize faster.
Greetings Earthlings!
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