Looking for a lift in your conversion rates? If you are confident that your Paid Placement account is well structured and that you have tested the most relevant page on the site as the destination, its time to consider dedicated Landing Pages.
Identify Your Audience – Are your keywords targeting visitors at different stages of the conversion funnel? If so, you should consider creating multiple landing pages that allow you to provide a different experience for each stage. The call-to-action and on-page content needs to match the mindset of the visitor.
Offer a Seamless Ad-to-Landing Page Experience – If your ad offers a discount or promotion, that same offer needs to be prominently displayed on the page that the user lands on. If the visitor is not able to easily find what you promoted, they will bounce.
Minimize on Page Elements – Be selective with the following:
- Calls-to-Action: It is tempting to offer various ways for the user to convert (e.g. online purchase, call, learn more form, email sign-up, etc). However, it is important to keep the experience focused by narrowing it down to 1 or 2 options.
- Navigation: Again, we want to keep the visitor focused on the end goal – conversion. When possible, minimize the navigation to prevent users from leaving the page before completing the desired call-to-action.
- Form Fields: Keep your forms short and note which fields are optional vs. required. To create the illusion of a shorter form, you can also consider placing two short fields side-by-side.
Layout is Key: How you organize the content and elements on your page will determine how it is absorbed by visitors:
- Keep call-to-action and most important offers/content above the fold.
- When content is robust, consider organizing with bullets and charts.
- If you have multiple images to display, consider rotating them in a slideshow format.
The above recommendations can also be helpful in optimizing landing pages for other marketing efforts such as email marketing campaigns. Just remember to not have the page crawled or linked to from the site if it has duplicate content and is intended for marketing only.