How to Create Effective Landing Pages for PPC (Pay per Click)
Whether you are using Microsoft’s AdCenter or Google’s Adwords for PPC, the landing pages play a vital role in getting a return on your investment. Even if your campaigns are organized and well structured, the lack of a targeted landing page will minimize sales and leads. Do you need help creating effective landing pages for your PPC advertising campaigns? Here are a few of the top tips that I can recommend:
Separate Landing Pages Per Campaign
Let’s say that you have created multiple campaigns for your PPC. The optimal thing to do in this situation is to create separate landing pages for each campaign so that you can test them independently. Other benefits include acquiring a variety of target audiences for those landing pages. Even though you might have a really impressive home page for your website, a suggested approach would be to create specific landing pages for each advertisements. This way, you will not only be able to compare the performance of each campaign in a much more meaningful way, but it will also help your quality score. After all, the quality score depends on relevant landing page factors. For example, is your landing page easy to find? Is it what the customer is looking for? Is the page easy to navigate?
Content Clutter
People who click on your ads are usually not on your landing page to read essays and long stories before they arrive at whatever they are looking for or in other words what you actually want them to do – a call to action. It’s advisable to keep your content short and precise for best results. I find so many landing pages that are inundated with stories that are designed to persuade customers, but in reality all they do is send people away.
There’s nothing wrong with stories as long as they are clear, compelling, and believable. Testimonials that are authentic are valuable, too. Wouldn’t it be of help if you provided what they wanted right away? Use titles, headings and bullet points and make certain parts of your content bold for emphasis. People will normally scan your content for the information they are looking for and rarely read word for word.
Transparency & Credibility
Along with crystal clear content is transparency. You as a company have an obligation to be transparent about your products and services. You can use testimonials, reviews and ratings and organize the data in content blocks. Another important tip is to use SSL certificates (used to secure credit card transactions, data transfer and logins and securing browsing of social media sites) on your sales pages so that the customer knows prior to entering confidential information that the company is letting you know that they agree to be trustworthy and transparent. This creates a bond of trust even before the actual transaction takes place. Ask yourself this question, “Would you share your confidential information with someone that has no credibility or no transparency?” In addition, you should keep any forms that are used to acquire user information easy to complete while indicating mandatory fields, terms and conditions and keep the form in the user’s view or and an easily accessed location (usually on the side panels).
Quality Score
Keep a close eye on your quality score. Google’s algorithm is very tough on quality scores as they are a number of factors involved. Some include the advertisement’s historical performance, the advertisement’s relevancy to the landing page and the landing page itself. Now, the landing page has to correlate with your ad and it also has to be easy to navigate for the visitors. Google tracks your landing page performance. For example, if someone clicked on your ads and did not spend any time on your page and/or performed no actions, then usually it is considered to be an ineffective landing page as well as a poorly written advertisement. So, what you would want to do here is to make your quality score your primary focus. If it is low, then find out why and make amends. Similarly, there is no hard and fast rule that you should only have one landing page for your ad campaigns. You can create as many as you want and test them to see which ones perform better than others. For those that do generate attention, it’s wise to repeat the same for other campaigns! A surprising number of marketers miss this opportunity.
