So you’ve decided to spend more on digital marketing to promote your product/business—pay-per-click, online banners, social media, email, etc. You’ve done your research, examined keywords, optimized ad copy, qualified the leads on your email list, grown your social network all in an attempt to send an avalanche of traffic to your… homepage?!
Think of your advertisements (search, banner, email, etc.) as promises that you are making to your customer/potential customer. For instance, if your advertisement for hotel accommodations in Boston reads, “Luxury Hotel in Back Bay – Now from only $137.50 per person!” But, upon attempting to book a room, the rates are $275 – you haven’t kept your promise.
Similarly, if your advertisement’s call to action (promise) cannot be easily discovered and fulfilled when the user clicks through to the landing page, they will likely make good use of their browser’s back button.
To help keep your promises, here are some good rules of thumb for optimizing conversion from the initial advertisement through the campaign landing page:
- Make it easy for users to identify and act on the page’s primary call to action and retrieve additional information as needed.
- Content on your landing page must be simple, scanable and reflective of the promise made in the original advertisement.
- Any forms that users are required to complete must be designed to be dead simple with as few fields as possible.
Keep your promises. Follow those three simple guidelines and, when in doubt, test your landing pages with members of your target audience, and your successful conversions will undoubtedly increase.
Tags: analytics, campaign landing page, conversion, design, pay-per-click, search, Social Media
Another important thing to note if you’re using pay-per-click ads is the relevance of the landing page to the ad copy. Google compares the copy in the ad to the copy on your landing page and looks for similar keywords. When found, it ranks the ad against all ads competing for the same search terms and assigns a score. That score helps determine when and how often your ad is shown. It’s not all about how much money you throw at it… sometimes you can get more out of your spend simply from creating better landing pages.
Google provides more in-depth explanation on Landing Page optimization here: http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/answer.py?answer=46675
I agree with the points you make. Many variables to keep in mind when designing and promoting a landingpage. It is however one of the best ways to generate quality leads.
On a side note, many B2B companies fail to follow up their web generated leads, because of the marketing /sales gap.