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Every business that engages in digital advertising wants to create engaging PPC landing pages that will connect deeply with their customers and drive conversion rate optimization (CRO). Of course, great landing pages are dependent on a myriad of different factors, including design choices, how and when you convey product value, relevance, and many more. All of these have to be in balance in order for your paid search ads to stand out as a pillar of your overall marketing strategy.
Of course, it’s not actually possible to distill the entirety of paid search marketing into a single sentence, but if you could it wouldn’t be too far off from this: CRO is all about guiding the lead through a compelling and value-added journey. Your search ads, landing pages, and CTAs must illuminate the path for your audience, otherwise they are likely to stray off it, try and build their own path, or travel down it in a way that wasn’t intended.
We all like to think of ourselves as mavericks from time to time, but in reality, people crave and appreciate guidance. This is not just true for consumer marketing; most of our relationships and interactions involve us being led through a narrative. What marketers can do is take advantage of this fact by structuring landing pages around familiar and recognizable touchpoints.
This is why you fulfill the promise of value at the beginning, because buyers are attuned to recognize when someone is giving them something useful and continue the relationship. It’s why you contextualize their pain point in the content, because people recognize and respond to that familiar yearning of wanting something more. And finally, it’s why you introduce that CTA at exactly the right time, as a way of saying, “Hey, now it’s your turn to make a move and continue this partnership.”
No matter how interesting and innovative your product is, people won’t just buy it for its own sake. You have to explain to them why they should listen to you, why it makes sense for them to buy it, and then exactly how they can buy it. That’s what guiding the customer through a buying journey is all about, and it’s what every successful landing page has to accomplish.
Generic marketing has its time and place: think about highly subjective video ads that succeed wildly at creating a certain mood, but don’t do very much to speak to particular buying situations. However, there’s really no room for generality when it comes to PPC landing pages.
For landing pages, specificity is always preferred, whether you’re talking about product descriptions, your CTA, links, or anything else on the page. When you get your targeting correct, then the specific messaging you employ is highly relevant to the users it reaches in a way that more generic material never can be.
The reason is that paid search visitors don’t arrive on a landing page just for the fun of it, except in rare occurrences. They navigate to your page because they have a specific goal or need in mind. Since generality isn’t driving their actions at this stage of their journey, generalized responses from a brand won’t be able to engage them in any meaningful way.
Yes, this means you will have to create different landing pages for various campaigns and categories of buyers. Utilize headlines that let the user know immediately that they’ve arrived at a page that speaks directly to what they were searching for. If hyper locality is a part of your marketing strategy, then put specific geographic information at the top so that it hits the reader’s triggers.
This landing page from IMPACT provides us with a succinct and pitch-perfect example of specificity in action. The headline speaks directly to professionals who want to increase the ROI of their blog and guides them into a solution for doing so.
URLs may live forever as long as the domain remains hosted, but that doesn’t mean that the information contained on them is always up to par. Numerous parts of your landing pages can change over time: Information becomes obsolete, new statistics are published, and links and images can become broken. If you direct a user to a landing page that displays any of these, you are putting up a serious red flag of unprofessionalism.
If you’re utilizing a landing page for a long-term marketing campaign, then checking in on the coding and the content at regular intervals is crucial to maintaining its effectiveness. Test links, make sure images load and are formatted properly, and verify the accuracy of any claims you have made. It’s the only way to ensure that every lead is presented with the optimal experience when they click on your ad.
Landing pages created for shorter-term campaigns also need to be monitored carefully. Once it has ended, you need to diligently remove any links to the customized landing page from AdWords as well as your internal site navigation. Few things will mar the customer journey more quickly than clicking on a broken link or being redirected to a landing page containing an offer that is no longer valid.
Almost every company now uses a site platform that features responsive web design, so there’s not much more to say about mobile, right? Not so fast. Employing responsive web design is an excellent start, but there is more to the mobile experience than simply formatting your landing pages to be readable on a mobile screen.
To understand why it’s so important to tailor the landing page for mobile users, just consider that mobile devices now account for approximately 53% of all paid-search clicks. These users now likely represent the majority of traffic on your PPC landing pages, no matter what industry you are in, and they deserve the same curated journey on your site that desktop users do.
The ubiquity of mobile screens has changed the way our brains respond to the browsing experience. People are now accustomed to content that unfolds vertically, and they expect high-quality images that pop on a mobile screen and fill up most of its space. They don’t want to have to pinch and zoom in order to access the value that was promised by the search ad. According to research from Adobe, companies with landing pages optimized for mobile triple their chances of increasing their mobile conversion rate to a minimum of 5%.
Check out this fantastic mobile landing page from Squarespace, a company you would expect to be on the leading edge of mobile optimization. Beautiful, well-formatted images, a relevant headline, and a clear CTA jump out at you as soon as your eye lands on the page, and they do a great job of layering buyer-specific value vertically.
Conventional wisdom says shorter sign-up forms are better at converting, because you want to get them in and get them out as quickly as possible. It makes sense when you think about it abstractly, because short forms are easy to fill out, and you want to make signing up as easy as possible. However, it doesn’t always play out that way in reality.
Multi-step forms have actually been found to convert more effectively than short forms, by up to 300%. There’s actually some very simple psychology at play that contributes to this dynamic. The first few questions each appear less daunting to answer one-by-one compared to filling out the entirety of a form in order to get what you need. By the time the respondent gets to the final questions, they will already be invested in the outcome, and you can move on to questions that have more substance behind them.
Keep in mind, however, that you can definitely go too far with multi-step forms. Try to stick to seven questions or fewer; when you go higher than that buyers start to feel like they are the target of an inquisition, and that your experience isn’t living up to its promised value.
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To learn more about how you can build more effective, higher-performing PPC landing pages, connect with our digital media experts today.