The aim of a well optimized pay-per-click marketing campaign is to get a steady flow of highly-targeted potential customers to visit your website for as low a cost as possible. But, of course, visitors do not automatically become customers, and how many of them actually do depends very much on the web page they are sent to when they click on your advertising. This web page is known as the ‘landing page’.
Choosing or designing effective landing pages for a pay-per-click campaign is not a task to be taken lightly. Your landing pages have to state your offer clearly and make it easy for your visitors to know at a glance both what you want them to do (for example, enter their details on an online form, join your mailing list or purchase a product directly) and why it pays them to do so.
Don’t send your pay-per-click visitors to your home page
One common mistake is to use the web site’s homepage as a landing page. This is usually a bad idea because, unless your website is about a single product, your homepage is unlikely to be targeted enough to convert a visitor who came in looking for something specific. Your landing pages have to be highly relevant to the ad that is bringing in the visitors, so that they quickly find what they are looking for and are motivated to stay on your website.
How to find the holy grail of landing pages
Now, keeping in mind that you have just a few seconds to gain your visitors’ attention once they click on an advert and reach your website, creating the landing page that converts as many visitors as possible might seem like an elusive holy grail. But there’s good news. Excellent news in fact!
The thing is that you can modify your landing pages at any time and so, you don’t have to get it absolutely right the first time. You can easily make small changes and test to see how they affect visitor conversion – and in fact this is exactly what you should be doing! By keeping what works best and discarding what doesn’t, you can make your landing page evolve into a killer marketing tool optimized for maximum results.
It is also possible to have multiple landing pages for a single ad running at the same time, where you send an equal number of visitors to each page and test to see which works best. This testing method is even more accurate because your results are not affected by the time of year (say, it’s Christmas one week and huge-credit-card-bills week the next).
Intuition is not good enough
Testing how different parts of a landing page affect its success is exactly what the people over at www.marketingexperiments.com have been doing recently. They found they could improve conversion ‘by more than 40% by making a number of key changes to the original page.’ If that’s not incentive enough to devote some real energy to testing and tweaking your landing pages, then what is?
Take a look at their reports here. Part 1 | Part 2
Some of the things these experiments revealed sound like plain old common sense, but others might appear downright counter-intuitive. For example, removing the price from a landing page resulted in a 6.6% drop in the conversion rate in one test they ran! In another test, removing a photo actually increased conversion by a whopping 39%.
Of course, some of these changes may have the opposite result in a different situation and the test results cannot be generalised across the board. But the clear lesson is this: take the trouble to test your landing pages to find out what works best for your market and do more of that. It will most definitely pay off with a dramatic increase in your return from your Pay Per Click advertising!
