First of all, it’s clear we all know what landing pages are, correct? If not, it’s basically the page on your site that users land on when clicking on an ad from a different site. Landing pages are crucial when it comes to PPC conversion rates, for a myriad of reasons. When a user clicks on your ad (yay! your ad text worked! your call to action was perfect!) you need to keep them hooked. Here are some tips to do so:
1. Make sure the most crucial information is posted where users can immediately see it. You do not want users to click over, only to find what seems to be nothing even related to the ad they clicked on. Take stock of your design aesthetic, the information you want to get across, and do so with your target market in mind.
2. Keep it simple. Back to the design aesthetic, limit the clutter. The less clutter on the landing page, the less confusion a user faces, and the likely you are to convert that user into a customer. Make sure that your landing page however, doesn’t look too sterile and appear almost to be spam. Play around with your page and see what works – navigation tools can be helpful for certain sites, and detrimental to others. Don’t be afraid to move things around, change things up every once in a while, and keep doing what you find works.
3. The headline needs to be beneficial and relevant. You want to reinforce why you have a solution for a user, rather than reinforcing the problem they are facing. Your landing page should be a place of refuge for the user, rather than another place to navigate and search for a solution. Hand that solution out on a pretty silver platter. Make sure that the landing page is different for each different ad that you have running. Pages need to be relevant; users like to feel like what they are getting from you is specifically designed and put together for them individually. If you ran a pet food company, think about the reaction users might have if they click on an ad for dog food and ended up on a joint cat-dog-fish-hamster food page. Make it relevant to each user.
4. Use contact forms to gather contact information from users. Contact forms can be viewed as a negative for some people, but a huge positive for others. What better way for a user to be proactive in receiving information from a company than to fill out the contact form? What better way for a company to be proactive in reaching out to it’s potential customers than to use a contact form? It’s really a win win. Contact forms are also of huge benefit for you because it allows you to filter out the users out there that aren’t as serious about what they are searching for. Filling out a contact form requires commitment on the users part, which makes that user a very strong lead for you.
As an overview, keep your landing pages clean, concise, beneficial, relevant and proactive. Make sure to keep track of what works and what doesn’t – tweak small things here and there and you will be amazed at how quickly your conversion rates increase!