So you think you’re ready for PPC management? Fantastic. But before you throw the kitchen sink at it, make sure you are prepared to succeed.
If your company is showing signs of growth, one of the first things to evaluate is the quality of your landing page. While PPC advertising can do wonders for your business by boosting your online visibility, driving qualified traffic to your website, and reducing wasted advertising spending, bidding on keywords and placing text ads in the search engines are not the only steps. Before you go on the hunt for the perfect PPC management firm, make sure you are sending people to a landing page that gives them what they want and makes it easy for them to take action.
Here are 5 quick tips on improving your landing page now.
1) Place your CTA above the fold
The goal of your PPC campaign is to drive people to your landing page, and once they arrive, to spur them onto action. Placing your CTA below the fold is one of the quickest ways to stifle conversions. Make your CTA stand out with eye-catching buttons, smart sales copy, and proper placement- and don’t forget to test different layouts to see which converts best.
2) Add customer and client testimonials
Testimonials are easy to produce and incredibly valuable. They give your visitors confidence in your sales pitch and boost their motivation to buy. Don’t leave them out. Ask your prized clients and customers to share a few words about their experience with your company and as long as you’ve done your job well, you’ll be surprised at how happy they are to oblige.
3) Avoid collecting data you don’t really need
If you don’t need a visitor’s full name and street address in order to get them through your order path, don’t request it. This is a surefire way to lose visitors and potential conversions. If you really need more than one or two pieces of data, try collecting it in steps to avoid overwhelming the user and consider including a payoff at the end, like a free white paper.
4) Capture user interest with a compelling headline
Did you know 80% of website visitors will read your headline but only 25% of those visitors will go on to read your body copy? This means your headline must be a good one. Ask yourself these questions: Is my headline specific to my offer? Does my headline explain how my product or service will benefit the visitor? Does my headline offer the visitor something unique? Make sure you can say “˜Yes’ to all these questions and you’re on your way to a compelling headline.
5) Use subhead(line)s to break your copy into chunks
Visitors don’t arrive at your landing page looking to read a novel. They are looking for something specific and you don’t have much time to deliver it. Once you accept that your visitors are going to scan your page, you can customize your copy for optimal digestion. Break your copy into readable chunks and use subheads to direct your reader’s attention. Identify key points and address them in short, succinct paragraphs, then top off each paragraph with a “˜mini-headline’ to help your visitors stay focused.
I hope these tips help improve your landing pages, boost conversions, and get more out of PPC.
Good luck!
About The Guest Author: Amanda Moshier is the staff writer and editor at Wpromote, Inc., the #1 search marketing firm in the US as ranked by Inc. 500.
Amanda Moshier,
What is the meaning of the acronym CTA?
Have you heard about Mike Dillard’s Pay Per Click Domination course? Full disclosure: I have an affiliate ad link on my EGO blog. I recently got an offer from Google Adwords for a coupon of SEK 600 for an ad campaign, so I will test it out pretty soon.
Do you have to have a landing page?
Hi Amanda,
I’m not really familiar about this. What does a landing page really does?
Nice post, easy to understand and implement these tips on a website immediately. Thanks
@Bianca
Courtesy of Wikipedia:
In online marketing a landing page, sometimes known as a lead capture page, is the page that appears when a potential customer clicks on an advertisement or a search-engine result link. The page will usually display content that is a logical extension of the advertisement or link, and that is optimized to feature specific keywords or phrases for indexing by search engines.
In pay per click (PPC) campaigns, the landing page will also be customized to measure the effectiveness of different advertisements. By adding a parameter to the linking URL, marketers can measure advertisement effectiveness based on relative click-through rates.
More about Landing Pages here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landing_page
I hope that helps!
Thanks for posting the clarification, Rose!
Martin, I should have clarified ‘CTA.’ CTA refers to a ‘call to action’ or the part of your website/copy/ad where you ask the user to do something – whether placing an order, making a call, or visiting your site.
As far as needing a landing page, it is generally understood that directing traffic sourced from a text ad or a link to a landing page will boost your conversions. This is because landing pages are designed to sell and hold the user’s attention, whereas other pages of a site may be designed to provide information, too much of which might overwhelm the potential client or customer to the point of frustration and/or non-action.
Hope that helps!
Amanda Moshier
Amanda:
Do you recommend having a number of different landing pages to gauge the effectiveness of each ad? For instance, if one ad is placed with website “A” and another with website “B”, would it be wise to have two landing pages (identical or separate) to determine which ad is “pulling” harder?
Julie
http://www.jadcc.com/blog
Hello Julie,
Thanks for writing! Split testing with landing pages is a great way to test the effectiveness of the landing page itself. Wpromote does landing page optimization and testing using an optimizer tool that makes it easy to see which landing page is performing better by normalizing the other variables over time (i.e. ad copy, source of traffic, etc.).
If you are trying to determine which ad is pulling more traffic, you would want to focus on ad performance above all other variables.
I hope that makes sense! Feel free to email me with any more questions!
Amanda
Your PPC provider can help you implement landing page testing in order to test different versions of a landing page and choose the most effective one.
Amanda Moshier,
Thanks for the explanation. I am just in “call to action” to test Google’s PPC starting campaign offer! 🙂