Building a successful pay-per-click advertising campaign requires a careful series of steps, all executed perfectly.
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.
A great landing page, on the other hand, can multiply a person’s enthusiasm for your offer and drive them towards taking action.
1. 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.”
Then there’s an example of the value it provides: “giving you more free time to spend enjoying your life.”
To make sure your headline hits the mark without being too complex, try to keep it as short as possible. Write your first headline, then edit it one, two or three times, removing unnecessary words until you have the shortest and sharpest possible headline.
The headline explains the product: it’s an email marketing tool. It also differentiates it from other email marketing tools by emphasizing that it’s elegantly simple. Finally, the subheading explains exactly how people can use the product. There’s even social proof in the form of a testimonial.
Aim to communicate your offer, its purpose and its value in a statement that can be read in three seconds or less. If you need to add more information, use a subheading. This improves the flow of your headline and simplifies your landing page experience for users.
Since your headline is the first thing people will see after arriving on your landing page, it’s vital that you get it right. Perfect your headline before you move on to the rest of your landing page and you’ll set the tone for the entire user experience.
The main headline
Your headline is the first thing that people see. It’s critical that it describes what a visitor will get from your company and show the visitor they’re in the right place. Ideally, your headline is short, punchy, and—above everything else—clear.
A classic example of an excellent USP headline comes from Domino’s Pizza: “You get fresh, hot pizza delivered to your door in 30 minutes or less—or it’s free.”
“Go from curious to confident.” Not only does Codecademy address the emotional state coding noobs have when they land on the page, but they also promise a clear outcome. In five simple words, they explain the full journey a new student will experience with them.
Tip! Can’t agree with your boss on a headline? Maybe it’s not even about words but a big debate between a blue and red color scheme. Page variants allow you to create multiple versions for one campaign to test messaging or address different target audiences.
The supporting headline
Your headline can only say so much if it’s to remain digestible. The easiest way to keep it short and sweet is to add a supporting headline. A supporting headline can be used in two ways:
- As a direct extension of the headline, where it follows the primary headline (like finishing a sentence).
- To extend the message by applying an additional, persuasive layer to support the primary statement.
But one-size-fits-all is rarely the best approach. Different things work for different people. That’s why we love how wine subscription service Winc, experimented with headline structures in landing page variants.
The original supporting headline has become the main headline without new supporting text in its place. It’s much cleaner and to the point.
Another thing that Winc does extremely well on both variants? The care they take with the other headings further down the pages. Even if you quickly skim-read, you know exactly what Winc does and what you’ll get with the service.
The lesson here is simple: Pay attention to every headline on your page, not just the big ones.
The closing argument
As your landing page comes to a close, you have one final chance to communicate the benefit of your offering. Think about it this way: before your visitor is ready to commit and live their happily-ever-after with you, they need that final assurance that they’re making the right move.
You can assuage their concerns by ending your page with some killer copywriting or a clear call to action that closes the loop of your USP narrative.
2. 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.
Don’t believe it? In 2010, air travel booking company Expedia discovered that a field in its credit card form was confusing users. Removing it resulted in a $12 million annual increase in revenue from online bookings.
No matter how motivated your audience is, complicated forms are almost always a conversion killer. Simplify your landing page form and you’ll reduce the percentage of users who bounce as a result of feeling intimidated by your form process.
Here are some simple techniques that you can use to improve your form completion rate and generate more conversions:
? Simplify. Remove any fields that aren’t 100% necessary, especially if they’re difficult for users to input.
? Remove ambiguity. If you need a user to enter their age, provide the correct format in your form text. If a user needs to enter their address, provide an example so there’s no confusion about where to put their street name or ZIP code.
? If you need a lot of information from users (for example, for an insurance or credit card offer), split one long form onto several pages and add a progress bar so that users are fully aware of where they are in the registration process.
There are only five fields, and all are clearly marked. There’s no need for users to enter non-vital data, such as their country. Passwords and other account-specific fields are handled later in the signup process, letting Optimizely maximize its conversion rate from this landing page.
Forms are extremely common conversion optimization bottlenecks. Make an effort to simplify and streamline yours as much as possible and you’ll be rewarded with a measurable increase in your conversion rate.
Tip! If you have a long list of questions or input fields required for your lead-gen form, or if you’re requesting particularly personal answers, it’s a good idea to use the breadcrumb technique.
People are more likely to commit to big tasks after committing to a small task—allowing you to ask more questions with the appearance of asking less, and all with a higher conversion rate. Win, win, and win!
3. 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.
Images are an essential part of any successful landing page. Of the 16 examples in HubSpot’s list of highly effective landing pages, 13 include either photos or digital graphics.
Images break up dense text, make a subject feel more engaging, and provide a visual example of how a product or service works. The old saying that they’re “worth a thousand words” is true, at least from the perspective of conversion optimization.
If your landing page is light on images, try adding a few to break up your copy and give it more visual flavor.
If your offer is targeted towards a specific demographic (for example, retirees or young people), try using images that represent your target demographic. If you want users to look in a specific direction (such as towards an opt-in form), try using an arrow or person looking in that direction.
As well as breaking up text and providing a visual example of your product in action, images can be used to reinforce points you make in your text.
If you list testimonials on your landing page, add a profile photo of each person to reinforce the fact that you have real, satisfied customers. If your users have provided product demo images, use them to show your product in action and give prospects a feel for how it works.
Images can make or break your landing page. Get them right and you’ll add a new dimension to your landing page – one that massively increases your conversion rate. Ignore them and there’s a serious risk that your page will read more like a textbook than engaging, persuasive copy.
4. Features and benefits
An effective headline and hero shot get your customer’s attention, while the features section provides a little more detail and answers any remaining questions.
When you’re introducing your features, it’s best to frame them in a way that accentuates the benefit they deliver.
Remember: your features describe what your product or service does, while your benefits describe the value you’re providing. Before listing your features, try putting yourself in your customer’s shoes and answering: “How will this product or service benefit me?
Sure, you could write a novel-length landing page covering every feature, but you’ll lose your visitor’s attention quickly.
You’re better off writing a brief summary of each (with a focus on value), then maybe a few bullet points for clarity. You can always circle back to remove any bloat or verbose verbiage—y’know, terms like “verbose verbiage.”
5. Social proof
If you’ve ever bought something online (and especially if it was expensive), you’ve probably obsessively scrolled through thousands of product reviews.
That’s social proof, and it’s a powerful tool of persuasion.
Simply put, social proof is the use of social signals to illustrate that other people have bought, consumed, read, or participated in what you’re offering. The idea is that people are more likely to convert if they see that others before them have (and were glad they did).
The research doesn’t lie. Research from BrightLocal affirmed that the average consumer reads at least 10 reviews before trusting a business, often spending almost 14 minutes reading customer feedback before making a decision.
The fact is that if you don’t provide the right social cues, your would-be customers may just head down a rabbit hole of a Google search and find something irrelevant yet convincing—like these downright silly Amazon reviews.
Keep control of your brand narrative by using social proof tactics like
- Customer reviews
- Count of how many customers you have
- Trust seals to establish the security of information
- Awards from reputable organizations
- Expert testimonials
6. Call to Action (CTA)
Your conversion goal is the purpose of your landing page. Your call to action (CTA) is the tactic that makes your goal a reality.
Generally, CTAs are presented as a standalone button on a click-through page or as part of a lead gen form. Poor CTAs are the standard “CLICK HERE” or “SUBMIT.” Terrible CTAs are created without thinking about the visitor journey.
It’s the entire reason you spent all this time creating a landing page. A good CTA ties back to your USP and clearly articulates what a visitor will receive in exchange for their click.
At first glance, you might be quick to point out that the landing page shows multiple buttons, each with a different CTA. And, true, having more than one conversion goal is a strict no-no—but you can use different CTAs as long as they serve the same goal.
By using CTA copy such as “Build My Office” or “Explore Workstation,” Branch crafts a virtual journey with their would-be customers in the driver’s seat.
Tip! CTA buttons are arguably the most important element on your landing page. By designing these buttons to stand out, you can dramatically increase the chances of conversions. This includes playing with color, fonts, sizing, and placement—all quick and easy fixes.
