Landing Pages

The success of paid search marketing campaigns is directly related to the first page a viewer sees - the landing page - after clicking on an advertisement. The right look, layout, copy, and sign-up or purchase options are all keys to optimizing landing page results and increasing conversion rates. This truth has been born out through millions of dollars worth of advertising spend that Direct Online Marketing™ has managed for its clients in addition to numerous other studies and independent tests.

Your First Impression

Landing pages serve as the introduction to your Web site and provide the first substantial information they see about your products and services. This is the first time someone has seen anything about your company and represents the best chance to get him or her to convert.

Landing Page Conversions

There are different types of conversions, so the goal of the landing page is determined by what you would like the visitor to do. If you have ecommerce capabilities, your primary conversion would be the sale, although there are any number of other conversions you could measure such as the addition of a product into your shopping cart, which will help you look into how you can decrease shopping cart abandoment rates.

For example, let's say you sell respirators that offer swine flu protection. You're wanting an order, preferably on the first site visit, meaning your conversion is the sale itself. Hence, your primary landing page conversion rate would be the number of purchases divided by the number of visits to the landing page or unique visitors. This can also be segmented down to the campaign type itself, meaning you can look at conversion rates from natural traffic from SEO campaigns vs. email newsletters vs. banner buys vs. any other campaign type.

Second example - maybe your business sells a larger ticket item or a service. Car dealers would rather have their sales staff talk to a prospective client (you try selling 4- to 6-digit cars online and yes, we know people that actually have brokered their own online and there are some pretty neat customization options out there these days). A landing page conversion for them might be someone signing up for a free brochure or requesting to be contacted, making their landing page conversion rate the number of requests for information divided by the number of landing page views.

Landing pages can also be optimized for offline events such as phone calls and making an in-store purchase. Many different tracing mechanisms are available from unique phone numbers (including those that are randomly generated to give an advertiser data all the way down to the keyword level for pay per click campaigns) to coupon tracking codes. Although please note, there may be instances where a unique tracking phone number could hurt some the effects of some campaigns such as local SEO efforts.

Increase Landing Page Conversion Rates

So you've chosen your keywords, created your paid search campaigns, and are driving visitors to your landing pages, but they aren't converting. You're paying for their traffic, but not getting leads and/or sales out of it. How do you increase your site's landing page conversion rates?

Test. Lather, rinse, repeat. We cannot strongly enough state how important this testing is. Qualitative research and our own experience shows many different factors matter, some of which may vary by industry. Even we don't nail it right the first time in a lot of cases. But Direct Online Marketing™ knows how to accurately measure results and test new ideas in order to increase landing page conversion rates.

Design, layout, copy, and page elements are all extremely important for landing page optimization. A few changes we test to increase landing page conversion rates include:

• the addition or removal of pictures (and which ones - pictures of persons particularly can have huge negative or positive effects on conversion rates)
• testimonials and symbols of credibity
• long copy vs. short copy
• layout
• sign up / purchase buttons
• personal or professional styles
• color schemes
• relevant copy and messaging by source type
• and many more landing page optimization elements

A Quick Note about Quality Scores

When goto.com began offering the first pay per click campaigns about a decade ago, the amount of money an advertiser paid for any particular click was determined by only two factors: their bid and the bid of the next lowest competitor. If you bid $0.70 for a keyword and the next person bid $0.30, you'd pay $0.31.

Today, the search engines all rely on a more complex formula that calculates a number of factors, which Google AdWords refers to as a Quality Score. The factors look at the historical performance of the keyword, including the click through rates of associated ads. It also looks at the associated landing page and some of the same factors it measures for the PageRank it uses to determine organic rankings (note that the PageRank Google will provide externally is not the same as what it uses internally).

Therefore, proper landing page optimization helps you not just increase conversion rates, but also decrease the amount of ad spend for paid search campaigns.

Learn More

Through the creation, testing, and optimization of custom landing pages, Direct Online Marketing™ can help an incredibly wide variety of organizations, including retailers and wholesalers, small businesses and large, and businesses in a whole host of different industries. Call 800.979.3177 today or request a free consultation.