As many of you know, your landing page is the page that visitors see after clicking on one of your ads, such as a Google AdWords ad.
This page could be part of your website or a special page you created just for this purpose.
Your landing pages are a core ingredient that can make or break the success of your advertising.
Why? Because your advertising doesn’t exist in a vacuum. On average visitors spend less than 10 seconds looking at a landing page to decide if they want to read more, or click that ‘back’ button and leave.
With the rallying cry “Landing Pages Forever!” behind us, we came up with 3 tips for stirring a little magic into your own landing pages.
1.) The Ad And Landing Page Should Match.
This may seem like common sense, but in reality you often don’t see this. If your ad holds out the tantalizing promise of 10% Off, make sure that same promise is reflected in the landing page headline and content.
When a visitor is searching for something, they know they have a whole page full of search results just one click away. If your ad-to-landing-page-progression doesn’t make sense to them they are just going to move on to the next result.
2.) Focus On Getting Your Visitors To Do 1 Thing
While I’m surfing the internet, I often see landing pages that go to either extreme – they don’t tell me to do anything, or they try to get me to do a million things. Both of these tactics are confusing and will water down the power of your landing page.
The key is to decide the one key action you want your visitors to take on this landing page, and then TELL them. Don’t make them guess or hunt around!
Your visitors aren’t stupid. Few people give 100% of their attention to reading your landing page. They’re also busy worrying if they left the coffee pot on this morning or that big report the boss wants them to finish by the end of the week. Your landing page has to make use of the narrow slice of attention you get and be crystal clear about what they should do.
3.) Include A Prominent Subscription Form Or Checkout Option
This ties in to #2. Once you have decided exactly what you want your visitors to do on your landing page, don’t make them click around on a massive treasure hunt to do it.
Make sure they can follow your instructions easily right on the landing page itself. Part of making something easy is making it prominent – don’t make the form tiny, or bury it all the way at the bottom of a 10-mile-long landing page.
ROI Revolution used the Google Website Optimizer Tools to set up an experiment for a client’s landing page. After intensive research in his field, his competition, and his ideal customer, we designed a Google Website Optimizer experiment where we tested 3 different headlines, 3 different images, and 4 different button text versions.
The best combination of the test variables resulted in an improvement of 221% over his original page.
Now the pay-per-click advertising he is bidding on to drive traffic to that landing page is 221% more effective than it was on the old landing page, and he doesn’t have to spend a dime more on his pay-per-click advertising for that sustainable increase.
