In the world of online advertising, businesses invest significant amounts of time, effort, and money in creating and managing paid ad campaigns. However, simply running an ad campaign is not enough to guarantee success. To truly make the most out of your investment, it’s crucial to ensure that the landing pages your ads lead to are well-optimised and relevant to your target audience.
Landing pages play a critical role in turning ad clicks into conversions and revenue, and can make or break the success of your ad campaigns. In this blog, we’ll take a deep dive into landing pages, discussing what they are, why they’re important, and how to create high-converting landing pages that drive business growth.
What is a landing page?
A landing page is a web page designed with the specific goal of converting visitors into customers or leads. It is where a user lands after clicking on a link, advertisement, or search engine result. Unlike other pages on a website, a landing page has a focused message and a clear call-to-action (CTA) that directs users to take a specific action, such as making a purchase, filling out a form, or signing up for a newsletter.
A landing page typically has minimal distractions and is designed to be visually appealing, easy to navigate, and optimised for conversion. Landing pages are a key tool in digital marketing and can be used to increase website traffic and drive sales. Whilst landing pages can also be used to improve organic search engine rankings, for the purpose of this article, we’ll be reviewing landing pages that are used specifically for ad campaigns.
Why do landing page experiences matter?
Creating an effective landing page is essential for any business or organisation that wants to convert website visitors into customers or leads. By providing a clear and compelling message, a well-designed landing page can persuade visitors to take a desired action, such as making a purchase, filling out a form, or downloading a piece of content. In this section, we’ll explore some key benefits of creating successful landing pages:
Increased conversions
Landing pages are designed to be highly focused on a specific goal, such as capturing leads or making sales. By creating a dedicated landing page, you can better guide your visitors to take the specific action you want them to take, resulting in higher conversion rates.
Improved targeting
Landing pages allow you to tailor your messaging and offer to a specific audience or segment. This means you can create multiple landing pages for different segments of your target market, which can increase relevance and engagement.
Better data and insights
Landing pages can provide valuable data and insights into your audience’s behaviour, preferences, and needs. By tracking visitor behaviour on your landing page, you can gain insights into what’s working and what’s not, and adjust your marketing strategy accordingly.
Increased credibility
A well-designed landing page can help establish credibility and trust with your audience. By showcasing your expertise and providing valuable information or offers, you can build trust and establish your brand as a reliable source of information or products.
Better return on your investment
By improving your conversion rates and targeting your marketing efforts, landing pages can help you get better ROI from your marketing campaigns. By tracking the performance of your landing pages and making data-driven decisions, you can optimise your campaigns and maximise your ROI.
Focus on one single product or service
The specific nature of a landing page means that you are able to focus your efforts on one single area of your business. This could be a service or product, or a selection of services or products that fit within one category. A highly targeted page will have a better conversion rate than other more general pages on your website.
How to create a high-conversion landing page
Creating a high-conversion landing page isn’t complicated and there are some key best practices to follow that will help your business get results. It’s important to note that the success of a landing page is dependent on a wide range of variables such as the quality of your traffic from your campaigns, so always bear this in mind.
A simple headline that grabs attention
The opening line for your landing page. This is where the page begins and is most likely the first thing that a user sees and reads on your page – so it has to do its job well! Your landing page headline has to be interesting and attention-grabbing, whilst conveying relevant information about what the page is about. It needs to do all of this without being overly long – below 10 – 20 words is preferred.
Your headline should get to the point about your product or service quickly. You don’t need to go into detail here, but make sure to encapsulate what you’re offering to pique a user’s interest. Apple is amongst the best at creating fast, snappy headlines for their landing pages. To introduce the Apple Pencil for iPad Pro they used the title ‘Completely familiar. Entirely revolutionary. Introducing Apple Pencil for iPad Pro’. In three short lines, they are able to draw the user in, get their attention and communicate what the page is about.
Effective subheadings
The subheading of a landing page is where you can delve into more detail about your product or service. They are usually located just after your main headline and are generally more persuasive in their tone. Think about questions such as why someone should purchase, use or sign up for what you’re offering. How will it benefit them? What does your product or service do? Answer these big questions and when combined with your punchy headline, you’ll have opening text that grabs attention and communicates only the essential bits of information.
Remember the purpose of the page
When you’re designing a landing page you should always keep its intended purpose firmly in the back of your mind. Everything should be pointing towards getting that all-important conversion. The language you use should sell your product or service and you really need to focus on why the user needs it.
Go into detail about the pain points of your users and how they can avoid them by using your product or service. We are far more likely to consider something if we know that it will help us avoid something negative or uncomfortable. Sentences such as ‘how to get more traffic to your website’ can easily be switched to ‘how to avoid losing out on traffic to your website’. This simple change tells the user what we’re going to do and how our service will prevent a negative.
Don’t forget the imagery and colours
Making your landing page look good is a great way of showing your users that you’re a trustworthy business. A well-designed website with good UI and UX will undoubtedly increase the chances of a conversion from a user.
Imagery is your first step in terms of the visuals of your webpage. Use large pictures that are of high quality and ensure that they are fully relevant to your page. If it’s a product you’re selling, then it’s a no-brainer to have a picture of the product on there at least once. A service will require you to think outside the box, but you want to use imagery that grabs attention and communicates what your service does.
Colour and overall design are just as important as your imagery. Your CTA for example should stand out from the rest of the page and make it clear to the user what they should do next. The text should be easy to read and things like buttons or links should be clearly visible. It’s also a great idea to set up and follow a style guide for your landing pages to ensure all pages look unified on your website.
Include your contact details
There are a number of different reasons to include your contact details on a landing page. The first and most obvious is to give your users a clear way of contacting should they need any further help or information. Maybe they want to ask about the product in more detail? Or they might want to ask whether it will work with a product or service they already own. Include your business phone number, email address, physical address or contact form.
The second reason to include your contact details is trust. Trustpilot named the inclusion of contact details on a webpage the second most important feature to instil trust in your users. Phone numbers, email addresses and physical addresses help to prove that you are a real, credible business.
Using the right keywords
In order to create an effective ad campaign, you need to ensure that the landing page you’re directing traffic to is highly relevant to the ad copy and keywords you’re using. When someone clicks on your ad, they are expecting to be taken to a landing page that provides them with the information they were looking for. If the landing page doesn’t match the ad copy or isn’t relevant to the user’s search query, they will likely leave the page quickly, resulting in a high bounce rate and a low conversion rate.
To avoid this, you need to make sure that your landing page uses the same keywords and phrases as your ad copy. By doing so, you increase the chances of the user finding what they are looking for on your landing page, and ultimately converting.
In addition to improving the user experience, using keywords in your landing page can also improve your Quality Score in Google Ads. Quality Score is a metric used by Google to determine the relevance and quality of your ads, keywords, and landing pages. By using relevant keywords on your landing page, you increase the likelihood of achieving a higher Quality Score, which can ultimately result in lower ad costs and better ad positions.
Add a persuasive call-to-action
Once every other element of your landing page is in place, it’s time to create the final element; your call to action. This is the most important part of the page as it’s what’s going to make the user take the next step in their buyer’s journey.
For a CTA, you need to write using compelling language that really persuades the user to convert. This doesn’t have to be complicated and should be more focused on the words used rather than the length of the content. Remember to be original and unique to make your CTA truly yours.
Some CTA’s choose to include some key data with the intention of really selling the product or service. Take Brian Dean’s website Backlinko for example; it features an effective CTA from a landing page that includes the sentence ‘want higher rankings?’. This is then followed by a short sentence highlighting how many others have already signed up, and then goes on to name-drop some of the key businesses that subscribe, including Disney, Amazon and Apple. This is a simple but effective way of communicating his expertise in just a few short lines.
How to track your landing pages
Once the hard work’s been done, you need to track the performance of your landing page to determine whether or not your strategy has been a success. It will also allow you to make any finer tweaks in the future if you find that something isn’t performing.
The most obvious way to track your landing page is by looking at your conversions – after all, conversions are what you’re looking to achieve in the first place. Accurate tracking should be set up to show the impact your landing page is having on the rest of your business.
Begin setting up your conversion tracking by using Google Analytics. This is quick and simple to do and gives crucial information such as how your goal is performing based on revenue, average order and more. What is considered a goal differs from business to business – landing pages can be set up with the purpose of making a sale or getting a newsletter signup for example.
Google Analytics is a very powerful tool which allows you to see all kinds of data relating to your landing page. Other metrics such as sessions, source or session duration will give a detailed image of performance and will help to inform what you do next.
Tools such as Hotjar or Crazy Egg are both powerful CRO (conversion rate optimisation) tools that enable you to use heat mapping to see exactly what parts of a page your users are interacting with. This helps to pinpoint any potential usability issues that may be preventing users from taking the next step. Perhaps your CTA is too far down the page? Or maybe there’s too much text on your page? Heat mapping gives a clear vision of where your users are looking (or not looking!).
High-conversion landing pages with Loop Digital
The importance of a landing page cannot be understated. They are the places on your site where users enter and purchase your products or services, so it’s essential they are performing at the highest level to drive traffic and revenue. Here at Loop Digital, we create high-performance landing pages for businesses across the UK. Our talented team are experts in developing successful web designs that help maximise your return on investment and increase conversions. Explore our web design services or contact us today to find out more.
Mel is our Partner Strategy & Delivery Manager and also a CIM Chartered Marketer, a testament to her commitment to excellence in the field. But Mel’s contributions don’t stop at the office door. Beyond her professional endeavours, she leads an active life as a qualified run leader and dedicated volunteer. Her experience in these roles has streamlined her leadership and teamwork skills, making her an invaluable asset when it comes to collaborating on projects and ensuring their success. Her sharp insights, strategic thinking, and knowledge have made her a backbone in our team’s ability to drive results for clients in this industry. Mel will make sure that we can approach marketing challenges from all angles and deliver outstanding results for our clients.
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