This client was furious and frustrated that his investment wasn’t producing better results. After studying his advertising campaigns, I quickly realized that he had neglected some basic techniques for finding potential customers online and converting them into paying customers.
One of the biggest mistakes he made was directing people who clicked on his ads to his website's home page. Instead, he should have directed them to a campaign landing page —a web page specifically designed to communicate a specific message related to an ad or series of ads.
Increase conversions with landing pages
Unlike your homepage, which people reach from different places, a landing page associated with your campaign allows you to study the behavior of visitors who viewed specific ads and adjust your approach to better convert them into customers. It is important to understand that each ad campaign should ideally have its own landing page.
It’s equally important to set conversion goals for your landing pages. Example of a conversion: a visitor who fills out a form and thus provides you with a lead for a potential customer. Without proper goal tracking , you’ll be spending without getting back the data that’s essential to optimizing your future campaigns.
Creating landing pages is equal parts art and science. It’s about balancing text and images and making it a place to gather information about your visitors.
How to communicate the right messages
The problem is that without testing, you won't really know if the way you've set up your landing page is communicating the right message to your target audience.
Don’t worry! There are handy tools for this. For example, ClickTale helps you understand the behavior of your landing page visitors using hot spot maps and mouse movement detection tools.
Other products, like Optimizely and Unbounce , allow you to run A/B testing, a technique that presents different versions of your landing page to a random sample of visitors to see how the variations affect conversion rates.
How an A/B test works
Your main landing page, or Page A, serves as a baseline for comparing the behavior of a subset of visitors who are redirected to a variation called Page B. It’s important to make only one major change to the current landing page at a time. For example, does using a red “Order Now” button instead of a green one increase conversions? What happens if you move that button from the left to the right on the page?
If you try to test several important variables at the same time, you will be unable to discern which of the changes influenced visitor behavior.
The 3 phases of a typical online buyer’s journey
Ideally, you should create and test different ads — and corresponding landing pages — for each of the three phases of the online shopper's journey (as indicated by the keywords they use).
1. Get informed
At this stage, online shoppers are beginning the process of finding what they’re looking for. They’re thinking in very general terms. Knowing this, ask yourself what would go through their minds before they’d even heard of your business. Example: “I’m looking for a flat screen TV.” From there, you need to better understand how to choose the right keyword match types and make sure that any of your landing pages are designed for visitors who are at this stage of their buying journey.
2. Analyze/Research
The online shopper has evolved. They know exactly what they’re overseas chinese in canada data looking for, but they don’t know who to buy it from. Example: “I’m looking for a flat-panel LED TV.” At this stage, it’s important that your ad and landing page position your business as a knowledgeable expert in your field. Provide information that helps your potential customers choose the product or service that’s right for them (links to articles, e-books, catalogs, etc.). When it’s time for them to buy, your product or service will be the first thing that comes to mind.
3. Convert
At this final stage, the online shopper now has a clear idea of what they want. Example: “I’m looking for a Panasonic LED TV.” They will use specific, action-oriented words in their searches such as “buy a Panasonic LED TV in Toronto.” Again, it’s important to remember and understand that your ad copy, related keywords, and landing page must meet the needs of an online shopper who is now at this stage of the buying journey if you are to convert them into a lead or paying customer.
Understanding how online shoppers' intentions and behavior are changing will help you develop more successful advertising campaigns and more effective landing pages.
Interpreting the data
After you've created your ads and landing pages and run your campaign for at least two weeks, there are a few important things to consider.
First, the key data points for each landing page, including these:
bounce rate (percentage of visitors who leave the page without visiting another)
average time spent on page
number of conversions
This information will help you tweak your pages through A/B testing. Properly combining your ad copy, ad-related keywords, and landing page content (images/text/videos/forms, etc.) will ultimately help improve the overall experience of your website visitors, improve your AdWords Quality Score , and ultimately optimize conversions.
A wealth of data, available through Google Analytics and Google AdWords, as well as the landing page tools mentioned earlier, will help you in this process.
The Scientific Way to Advertise
If you don't test your landing pages, you can only guess what will perform well in your online advertising campaigns.
The great thing about online advertising is that you don’t have to rely on impressions or intuition to decide what will work best. You can test ideas and determine empirically what will yield the best results. You can then continually make adjustments, improving your conversion rate and increasing your sales every month.
