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6 Fundamentals of PPC Landing Page Optimizations

Landing page banner

Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)

Your landing pages aren’t converting. Sadly, this is not your customer’s fault. It’s your job to tell your customers why your product is awesome and you have fewer than five seconds to tell that story.

Regardless of whether you’re a rookie or veteran marketer, we’ve assembled the following checklist to help you avoid some of the common pitfalls we see all too often with pay-per-click landing pages. The hope being that you can take some of the recommendations into consideration before you go live with AdWords campaigns of your own.

1) Pre-Populate Cursor

Does your landing page have a form field you want customers to fill out? If it does, a great way to reduce friction, and increase conversion rate, is to pre-populate the cursor into the first field. This might sound like a nit, but in all the tests I’ve seen run, this seemingly slight difference has had a significant impact on conversion rates. A great example of this in the wild is what eHouseOffers does with their sign up page.

Ehouseoffers home page
Ehouseoffers

2) Eye Contact

You’re driving northbound on I-5 (or whatever interstate you drive in your hometown) and there’s an accident in the southbound HOV lane. What do you do? You probably turn your head and look at what everyone else is looking at. This ostensibly obvious piece of human behavior is something you shouldn’t overlook to talk to your designer about on your landing pages.

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What do I mean? Well, the concept is simple. Think of it as the “Look at what other people are looking at” principle, but essentially what it means is that people will tend to look where the subjects in your hero graphic look, not necessarily at your ad creative.

Ppc landing page optimization
Ppc landing page optimization

As the above heatmap shows, landing pages are no different from highway accidents: you look where other people are looking. So, if you have a landing page creative with people in them, why not take a page out of what PayPal does with their landing pages and have your subjects look in the directions of your call to action?

6. 3

3) Testimonials

Another tactic that is incredibly effective is including customer testimonials on your landing page. There’s really no better way to build trust with prospective customers than to have existing customers using your praises. And though you don’t necessarily have to do what Sono Bello Body Contouring does and include the testimonial in the header of your site, you should include testimonials somewhere on your landing page – possibly in the sidebar.

Ppc landing page testimonial
Ppc landing page optimization testimonial

4) Point of Action Assurances

It’d be ridiculous to create a landing page checklist without referencing Bryan Eisenberg, who was truly one of the first real conversion rate gurus. One of the best tips Eisenberg gives in his book Always be Testing is around the importance of putting trust icons, or “point of action assurances” as he calls them, next to your call-to-action buttons. Put another way, if you put trust icons next to your submit buttons more people will click on them. One of many examples of this principle in action is what Provent Therapy does on their sleep apnea treatment landing pages.

Point of action assurances with call to action buttons
Call to action

And inexpiable as it sounds, it is vital that these trust icons, which can vary from McAfee Secure logos, to Visa logos, to industry awards, are as close to your call-to-action buttons as possible. Why? Well, because customers will notice these symbols and feel at ease. Strange as it sounds these logos will in fact reinforce trust and increase conversion rates.

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5) Match Headline with purpose

Not to be abandoned when considering landing page optimization is Google AdWords quality score. Having a high quality score will not only decrease your cost-per-click, it will also help reduce overall acquisition costs

And though quality score is comprised of many parts – including keyword relevance and ad copy – you should always make sure you’re getting the most from the headline of your landing page. Specifically, once visitors get to your landing pages, you should make sure you remind them that the site they’ve landing on is in fact exactly what they a) searched for and b) clicked on in your ad.

One startup out of San Francisco who really gets this, and who has seen some early wins from creating targeted landing pages is Red Beacon, which is a site who recently won the TechCrunch 50 that’s dedicated to connecting consumers with service professionals.

Red beacon landing page headline
Red beacon customized landing page headline

6) Drive a Single Call-to-Action

One of the most communal mistakes we see is people trying to do too much with their landing pages. If you ask visitors to do 55 things, odds are they’ll bounce instantaneously. However, if you focus on driving a single action, you’re likely to get people to take the action you want.

And even though from hosted exchange to great SEO books there’s no shortage of sites who implement great simple landing pages, the concept is not to be forgotten. Pick something uncomplicated and urge people to take that single action. With landing pages the old adage is incredibly true: less really is more.

Mailchimp landing page
Mailchimp tool landing page

Ultimately, there is no one size fits all landing page. There are many methods or approaches you can take and some useful gallery sites to get design ideas from, but there’s no substitute for understanding the principles of conversion rate optimization and working with a talented designer to give you exactly what you’re looking for.

And though this is not a comprehensive landing page checklist, feasibly the above examples provide a useful overview of some of the key principles you can apply to your landing pages before you throw too much ad spend at sub-optimal, poorly converting creatives.

Thoughts or questions about optimizing PPC Landing pages? Let us know in the comments!

Image credits: Mailchimp, Red Beacon

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Shubham Gowda

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