When it comes to getting the most out of your paid advertising efforts, dedicated landing pages are your greatest asset. Not only do they provide opportunities for leads to find your brand organically but they, ultimately, serve as a lead capture tool.
If you’re using a pay-per-click (PPC) advertising model, it’s important to direct leads to a landing page with messaging that matches the ad they clicked on. If you direct them to your website, your customers will experience a disconnect because they’re going from the specific messaging of the PPC ad to a generalized description of your business on your homepage.
This makes for a confusing customer experience, making them that much more likely to leave your site without researching or purchasing their intended product or service. Dedicated landing pages help to prevent this bounce and create consistency in the user’s experience with your brand.
When it comes to developing landing pages, there are a few best practices to follow. You want your landing pages to focus on one goal, have quality messaging (and design), and, most importantly, you want to test your efforts. Let’s elaborate.
Focus on One Goal
An effective landing page has one goal and one goal only. What that looks like is up to your business and its advertising objectives. It could be to download a free e-book or whitepaper, watch a product demo or opt into your newsletter — i.e. something valuable that makes your leads want to exchange contact information. Just remember to offer only one thing because this gives clear direction and keeps the lead’s attention ratio to a minimum.
“Unbounce” defines a landing page attention ratio as the ratio of landing page links to the number of campaign conversion goals, which should ideally be 1:1. Look at links as opportunities for leads to leave your landing page without converting. The more you have, the more likely they are to do so. Having only one call-to-action (CTA) increases the likelihood that your leads will convert.
Quality Messaging (and Design)
With quality landing pages comes a higher amount of quality traffic, and thus makes a PPC campaign that much more effective. Quality landing pages not only look clean and professional, but also have targeted messaging that matches your correlating ads, resonates with your leads and even ups your Google quality score. This ensures you’ll attract quality leads interested specifically in what you have to offer. Your landing page copy also plays a significant role in your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts to help leads find your brand organically.
Having well-designed landing pages plays a large role in lead conversions. Your pages should have a simple, user-friendly layout that make it easy for leads to convert. It’s also important to take into account things like page load speed, as a page that loads slowly can cause significantly higher bounce rates.
Test Your Efforts
You won’t always create a perfect landing page on the first try. Doing simple A/B tests allow you to create two versions of a landing page, see which version performs better and move forward with that version. A/B tests are most effective when you only test one variable, such as headline copy or the use of images versus videos. If you have more than on variable, it becomes difficult to pinpoint what affects your lead conversion more.
When it comes to creating effective landing pages, less is more. Sticking to one goal, crafting simple messaging and design and testing one variable at a time will significantly improve your paid advertising efforts and give your campaigns the happy conversion rates they deserve.
