When setting up a PPC campaign the ad content and keywords can be a strong focus for many people and the landing page often gets overlooked. This resulting in plenty of clicks through to your website but little to no conversions.
The user experience of your landing page can have a big impact on the results of your PPC campaign. People may click through from your ads but if the page isn’t designed correctly and provide the result they were looking for, they can quick leave.
Let’s take a look and some of the elements that can help your landing page convert.
Design
People don’t read a website like they would a book, they scan the page and look for the answer as if it should pop out the screen for them. So, when you are thinking about the design of your landing page ensure you break the content up into easily digestible sections.
To do this think about shorter paragraphs, lists and text boxes to keep the user moving around the page. Keep the page quite visual as well with plenty of images.
As you finish the design and content on the page as yourself the below questions. If you can get others to review the landing page and answer these questions before going live it will give you valuable feedback to evaluate and the possibility to make enhancements.
Test your page before your pay for your ads!
Is the page easy to understand?
Can you clearly see what is available?
Does it explain the benefits?
Is it easy to complete the call to action?
Content
During the design section we talked about breaking up the page into easily digestible sections. This applies to the content as well as the design of the page. Keep your content short and snappy. You want to think about starting a conversation with the user, ask questions in your headers that will entice them to carry on reading the text below to find the answer they are looking for.
Show the user you understand the problem they may be having and explain how you can help. For example, the problem may be “struggling with conversion for your PPC campaign?” the content would then go on to explain how I could help resolve this and what it will give the user.
The language you use in your content needs to be persuasive. Think about what you are offering the user not just what you do. Remember you only have one page to convert them, so the content needs to be clear, persuasive and easy to understand. Also don’t presume anything be clear and concise in your offering.
Adding customer reviews within your landing page can be a great trust signal. Reviews back up the information you have provided so far and shows other people’s experience of your service and the value that they have received.
CTA and Enquiry form
A call to action (CTA) should tell the user what you want them to do and should appear throughout your landing page. Some common examples are:
Sign up
Join
Download
Learn more
The location of your CTA is important and should follow the flow of your content. If your page is broken up into sections, ensure each section ends with a CTA. The colour of the CTA can also have an impact and there is a lot of psychology around the impact different colours can have. To truly know you will need to A/B test this concept with your audience which we will cover further down. What I will say on this is that the CTA needs to stand out and be clearly seen so bold and bright colours will help.
The enquiry form itself needs to be clear, simple and quick to complete. Don’t add too many extra ‘nice to have’ fields or the user will lose interest and abandon the site. Make it clear which fields are mandatory and optional and what type of information is required in each field. Don’t presume a user will know how to complete your form, guide them through it with extra information or tool tips.
A/B testing
A/B testing can help to understand how your landing page is really performing. By splitting the traffic to multiple landing pages, you can test different designs and content to analyse the best outcome for your audience.
You can A/B test your landing pages for the following:
Change the context of your text to see whether a hard sell message of a softer approach works best.
Try different lengths of text. Some pages might need a lot of content to go into detail about what is being offered and others might need smaller snippets and just clear benefits.
Test your call to action. Try the CTA in different positions on the page and as we mentioned above testing the colour to see if this increases the sense of urgency.
Test a new design. You could completely redesign the page and A/B test your original to the new design.
Experiment with different forms. You could try different lengths of forms and designs to help capture more information but ensure the user completes it.
Here are a few platforms that can help you with your testing: https://www.optimizely.com/ https://unbounce.com/
Summary
Analysing and optimising your landing page can help to increase knowledge of your users and ultimately increase conversions. Always keep the end user in mind when designing the page, don’t presume anything and always review your analytics as the page goes live.
To recap on what we’ve covered:
Design – remember people scan web pages so break the page up and make it easily digestible.
Content – the content needs to show the benefit to the user, be persuasive and answer their question.
CTA and enquiry form – the CTA should follow the flow of the page and the form should be simple.
A/B testing – test and review how your page is working, improvements can always be made.
Read our full guide on how to create and manage your PPC campaign by clicking here.
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