what is a good conversion rate for landing pages – Building a successful pay-per-click advertising campaign requires a careful series of steps, all executed perfectly.
Never Start A Marketing Campaign Without A Dedicated Landing Page
Table of Contents
What is a landing page?
A landing page can be any page that someone lands on after clicking on an online marketing call-to-action. Dedicated, promotion-specific landing pages are what we’ll be focusing on. Dedicated landing pages are standalone pages that are designed for a specific marketing campaign.
By standalone I mean that it has no ties to your website, like global navigation. In essence it floats alone, only accessible from the link you’re providing in your marketing content (the call-to-action in an email for example).
The purpose of a landing page falls into two categories:
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to capture leads that enable you to market to people in the future, or
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to “warm up” potential customers to the product you are trying to sell to them before sending them further into your sales funnel.
This creates the need for two types of landing page – a lead generation page and a click-through page.
Lead generation landing pages
The most valuable piece of information you can get from a lead gen page is someone’s email address – which gives you permission to continue talking/marketing to them.
Once you have a lead’s permission, you then try to convert them into a customer by combining the two most powerful 1-to-1 communication tools a marketer has – email and landing pages.
Click-through landing pages
Click-through pages (sometimes called jump pages) are designed as a conduit between a marketing ad and it’s final destination. The goal of a click-through page is to “warm-up” the visitor to the product/service you are trying to sell.
Commonly used for ecommerce, click-through pages provide enough information to inform the buyer, making them ready to purchase, before pushing them further down the funnel – probably to a shopping cart or checkout.
What’s the Point of a Landing Page?
Okay, so now that I’ve hammered the definition of a landing page into you, let’s talk a little bit about the point of the landing page, and what makes them such a valuable marketing tool.
There are essentially three types of landing pages, each with distinct purposes:
- Direct sales
- Lead generation
- Relationship building
There’s choosing the right keywords, which dictate the intent of your audience. There’s writing or designing a great ad, which determines your campaign’s clickthrough rate and average cost per click.
Then there’s converting the traffic you generate into users, leads and customers. That’s the job of the final piece of the PPC marketing puzzle: your landing page.
The landing page you use in your PPC campaign is your chance to speak directly to your target audience on your terms. You’ve got a prospective buyer on your website; now you can speak to them without the restrictions or limitations of an advertising network.
Landing pages can range from awful to awe-inspiring. Awful landing pages repel your audience and hurt your conversion rate, turning a motivated person (they did, after all, click on your ad!) into an uninterested former prospect.
A great landing page, on the other hand, can multiply a person’s enthusiasm for your offer and drive them towards taking action.
Below, we’ve listed five key components of highly effective landing pages that convert. If you’re struggling to convert PPC traffic from AdWords or Facebook into results, go through this list and check that your landing page includes all five “must have” characteristics.
Use simple, intuitive forms
Have you ever clicked on a link and arrived on a landing page, only to encounter a form with a seemingly endless number of fields?
While long and detailed web forms are necessary for some offers, they’re kryptonite for a good user experience. Users hate filling in long and complicated forms, and many people will simply click the back button before they fill in field after field of information.
This is true even if users are interested in your product or offer.
Use images
Which is more fun to read: a magazine or a textbook? Academics aside, the majority of people would rather read a picture-heavy magazine than a dense, single-spaced page of content from a textbook.
Despite this, many marketers design their landing pages like academic textbooks, with dense blocks of text and few, if any, images.
A great headline
Your landing page’s headline is the first thing prospects will read after they arrive on your page, so it’s essential that you get it right.
Great headlines explain your offer and clearly communicate its value. Bad headlines include all the wrong information without clearly defining what your offer is and how it provides value.
What do you do when you meet a new person? You introduce yourself. Your headline should act as an introduction to your offer:
- It should explain what your offer is.
- It should explain what your offer does.
- it should explain why your offer is valuable.
For example, pretend you’re creating a landing page for a new type of vacuum cleaner that can clean a carpet in half the time required by its competitors. The following headline clearly hits all the requirements listed above:
“The QuickClean Vacuum Cleaner lets you clean your home twice as fast, giving you more free time to spend enjoying your life.”
There’s a clear description of what the offer is: “The QuickClean Vacuum Cleaner.”
Then there’s a clear statement of what it does: “ Clean your home twice as fast.”
Include a value proposition
Remember the three-step formula we outlined above for a great title? The final step was to list your offer’s value – the benefits it provides to leads, clients or customers.
This is called a value proposition, and it’s an essential part of any landing page. Without a clear value proposition, people that arrive on your landing page aren’t likely to understand how or why your offer is worth pursuing.
As ConversionXL explains, a value proposition:
- Lists the key benefit of your offer
- Explains what you do, who you do it for, and why it’s useful
- Lists secondary benefits and important features
- Communicates why your specific offer is the right choice
Unlike a headline or subheading, a value proposition isn’t always a single item. Instead, it’s a theme that repeats throughout your landing page, both in your copy, your images, your videos, your subheadings and your customer testimonials.
Check your compatibility and load speed
No matter how effective your landing page is at turning prospects into customers, it’s unlikely to generate a positive return on ad spend if only half of your audience can see it.
Load speed is one of the most frequently ignored factors in landing page optimization. It’s also one of the most important. 40% of users abandon a website if it takes more than three seconds to load, making it essential that your landing page renders quickly.
Before you start sending traffic to your landing page, use Google’s PageSpeed Tools to analyze its performance. Identify weak points (such as large image files or poorly optimized code) to fix before you launch your campaign.
What do you think? How many landing pages do you have on your website? How have they increased your online marketing results?
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