Before we start discussing landing page ideas, let us briefly describe the purpose of a landing page. Think of it as a way of converting your website visitors into leads. These potential customers could result in sales. That means a landing page is also the first step towards your conversion funnel.
Landing pages are extremely useful for most businesses, regardless of how varied their goals might be. They will be effective for brands selling products and services. They will be equally important to companies generating leads. That’s because a higher number of conversions will translate into more sales. Basically, you can use the conversion rate routed through landing pages to measure the online success of your business.
That being side, the flip side of the equation should be discussed too. If your landing page is a garden variety home page, you could be wasting potentially high-quality traffic. Even having a huge PPC budget would mean you are only wasting your money! So, it is important to not just have a landing page but also optimize it for high sales volume.
So, how can you optimize your landing page and boost the conversion rate? Here are some pointers to consider…
Understand your campaign goals
All the content on a landing page should be geared towards one objective. If there are multiple CTAs on such a page, all they would do is confuse the users. Therefore, it is crucial that a landing page offers only one solution. For instance, for a live chat software’s landing page, the focus could be on a downloadable instructional guide explaining its importance. Anything else would simply cause confusion. Visitors who land on the page will encouraged to realize what this software can do for them. Potential clients will see that and be converted into a lead when they part with their email addresses in exchange for the guide!
Create attention-grabbing headlines
Look at the image given above. The headline is concise and eye catchy! It is ideal because it will hold the attention of the website visitors long enough for them to take a tour. Remember that attention spans are getting shorter. That doesn’t leave much time for you to leave an impression on a visitor.
There is, however, another condition that a good headline must satisfy. Along with a good first impression, it should be clear enough to let people know what you are offering. When generating a lead, this factor is equally important because it will influence whether the visitor acts upon your CTA or not. A good idea would be to try out several headlines and then pick out the one that gets the best response from the visitors.
Use mobile-friendly landing pages
A good landing page has a catchy headline. A great one will also be mobile friendly! Desktop traffic is being surpassed by mobile traffic even as we speak. Therefore, having a well-designed, effective landing page won’t do much, if it gets all wonky on a mobile screen.
That brings our attention to two important factors. One, the landing page should be constructed on mobile-responsive templates. Two, you must consider how most users behave on mobile devices. Adding lengthy web forms might go overlooked in a desktop version, but your mobile users will never forgive you for them! You will be left with incompletely filled out forms and, thus, miss out on countless potential opportunities.
One approach is to have a bare bones form. Your visitors just fill in their name and email address – or even just an email. Bam! They are considered potential leads. However, if you must have the users fill out their life history – and that of their neighbors – there is a solution that can help! Use multi screening or cross-platform browsing to get the complete information. Think about it, we all use multiple devices throughout the day. This cross-device behavioral quirk of ours can come in handy for your landing page. Simply put, the visitor uses their mobile to search and arrives on your website. Any forms they need to fill can be completed on another form-friendly screen, such as the desktop.
Track absolutely everything
Use Google Tag Manager to keep track of everything from an unusually reduced stream of visitors from a source to an abnormal bounce rate. The better you know how your visitors are behaving, the more optimized your landing page would be. It is time to adopt custom metrics and stop depending on the formulaic ones.
Want to boost the abysmally low rates of the newsletter sign ups? Begin tracking micro-conversions to get a clear idea of what keeps people from signing up. With the help of Google Data Studio, you can even keep track of all the metrics in one place. If they are easy to get to, you would be more likely to analyze the data from them. With in-depth analysis, you can improve your tactics and get more conversions!
Look at the picture above. It makes use of Dynamic Text Replacement (DTR) to address the visitor Alex in a personalized way. If both Alex and his friend click on the same PPC ad, DTR will generate different messages for each of them. Even though they are taken to the same landing page, they will both have different experiences! Extend its application to an e-commerce business, and you will see why it is so effective. A person looking for a modern leather sofa wouldn’t have much use for copy written for comfortable leather sofas. DTR offers an even higher degree of personalization by switching the ad copy for one that reflects the visitor’s query.
Even if you don’t change anything else on the landing page for two such search queries, your users will leave feeling they found exactly what they were looking for. A highly converting landing page also needs to be hyper-relevant. But don’t take our word for it. Consider what Google has to say on the subject of the relevance of landing pages to ads. Relevance matters to the search engine, hence the introduction of Quality Score metrics. This parameter takes you deeper into the AdWords interface. It also clearly shows you how well your landing page, expected CTR and ad relevance are doing and which one of them needs improvement.
We already know that a relevant PPC ad can help improve the conversions coming through your landing page. Surprisingly, the reverse is true as well. If your landing page is in sync with your ads, you will likely see improvement in PPC performance. A higher Quality Score can mean a lower CPC, which in turn, could make your ad rank higher for relevance. In short, it is all about offering your visitors exactly what they need.
Finally, it’s important to remember that great landing page ideas could come to nothing if you don’t test things out. Trying to find the right headline? Test several of them! Checking to see if the landing page loads smoothly? Test it out on multiple screens! A highly converting website shouldn’t be a pipe dream if you test every aspect of it before expecting it to generate revenue. A one-size-fits-all strategy just won’t make the cut!
