INTERNET MARKETING

There is no such thing as an effective pay-per-click campaign without effective landing pages. For PPC beginners, a landing page is the page the user is taken to when they click on an advertisement. That landing page should be tailored to the user coming in from that particular ad. What is going to make the user most interested in your product or service? What content on the landing page is going to get the user to convert?  

AdWords has taken the importance of the landing page into account even in the quality score equation. One of the factors in keyword quality score is quality of the landing page. However, from personal experience, I have often found the AdWords quality scores to be illogical (I remember an instance in which the singular keyword was given a 3 quality score while the plural of that keyword was given a 7 quality score). The best judge of the actual effectiveness of a landing page is your audience. Google is not your audience. When building your landing page, you must have the mindset, what is going to make the consumer viewing this landing page convert? If the purpose of your page is generating leads, what content is going to get the user to submit their information?

1. Continue the conversation – continuing the conversation is one of the key principles of inSegment. When the user enters a query into Google, they are initiating a conversation. The text in your ad is your response to their initial query. The user clicks your ad because they liked or were interested by your response and then they are taken to your landing page. Ideally, we would create a landing page tailored to each individual user but we don’t have the time or resources to do that. Instead, you have to base the content of the landing page on the ad text that brought the user to your page. If your ad text boasted about your pay per click services, elaborate on your pay per click services on your landing page, rather than leading them to a general page about your online marketing company as a whole.

2.  Include relevant imagery – a woman in a pantsuit with a nice smile may look professional and welcoming, but what is it telling the audience about your product? Nothing. Users can tell when images are obvious stock images. The absolute worst thing that could happen is the user reaches your page, sees an irrelevant image, thinks that the page is not relevant to them, and hits the back button. In PPC marketing, the back button is your worst enemy. The landing page should contain a picture either of your product/service or the benefits of your product/service. Again, putting yourself in the audience’s position, what image would you want to see that would make you more likely to click?

3. Write anchor text that makes people want to click – Landing pages often have multiple assets to be downloaded. One common asset for businesses is a whitepaper or case study. If your company was advertising PPC services, don’t have a link that says “Read a Case Study.” That link should say something like “Read How We Improved a Client’s Conversion Rate by 500%” or “Read How We Lowered Cost per Conversion by $40.” Use this text to show off, brag a little bit, but leave the reader wanting to learn more. They will be more likely to click the link and then enter their information to read the rest.

4. Have action-based text in your “submit” button – Most forms contain at least a field for “name” and “e-mail address” followed by a “submit” button. This is boring. Instead of “submit,” the submit button should have text that describes what the user is getting by clicking that button. All “submit” does is tell them that they are giving away their information, something users are reluctant to do. If the purpose of the button is to download a whitepaper, have the button say “Download Now!” The user will be more likely to click if they like what they see in the text.

5. KISS: keep it simple, stupid – words to live by. Don’t overwhelm your audience with a barrage of text on the screen. Bullet points are a great way to condense text and make it more readable for your audience. It is very important that the main action you want the user to complete is obvious to them. Don’t overwhelm the user with a variety of options. If your ad text on Google says “Contact Us!,” the main focus of your landing page should be a button to “Contact Us!” While you may have a lot of information you want to show the user, this is not the place. As I said before, continue the conversation started by the user’s search query and lead them down the path you want them to go.

That’s it! Follow these five simple steps and you will have great PPC success! Just kidding. There is a lot more to effective landing pages than these five steps, but the core principle remains the same. Before making any changes to your landing page, ask, will this make users more likely to click through? If the answer is yes, do it!