5 Easy Ways to Boost PPC Landing Page Conversions
Fighting to increase your landing page conversion? You’re not alone. Only 22% of businesses are satisfied with their landing page conversion rates. In the PPC world, marketers obsess over click-through-rate (CTR), cost-per-click (CPC), impressions, ad copy, match types, ad scheduling, and that’s just to name a few. Managing all these campaign elements means ppc landing pages are often relegated to an after-thought.
PPC Landing Pages: Why They Matter & How to Get Them Right
Fighting to increase your landing page conversion? You’re not alone. Only 22% of businesses are satisfied with their landing page conversion rates. In the PPC world, marketers obsess over click-through-rate (CTR), cost-per-click (CPC), impressions, ad copy, match types, ad scheduling, and that’s just to name a few. Managing all these campaign elements means ppc landing pages are often relegated to an after-thought.
Enticing potential leads to click your advertisement is only half the battle. When you launch a paid search or social campaign remember metrics like CTR and CPC are only as valuable as the information visitors (and potential buyers) are willing to give you.
In this post we’ll uncover 5 easy ways to optimize your PPC landing page and increase conversions.
Headline & Sub-Headline
Arguably one of the most important aspects of your PPC landing page, the headline and sub-headline are the most immediate elements your visitors see. You have seconds to convince a visitor to continue reading before they bounce and never return. The first thing visitors are looking for when they click your ad is the original offer or solution you advertised.
Make sure your keyword appears in the headline to keep the user experience consistent from search intent to PPC ad to landing page. By including the keyword in the headline of your ad and on the landing page you’re not only helping your Quality Score, you’re signaling to visitors they are in the right place. The goal is to build PPC landing pages with your visitor’s search intent in mind, so be sure to include contextual and relevant copy that speaks to their pain point.
Dead Simple Call-to-Actions to Drive Conversions
You know what you want your visitors to do when they land on your page, but do they know? In order to drive conversion, you want to compel your audience to take a particular action. Reduce the amount of friction to your desired action by using clear call-to-actions (CTAs) that visually stand out from other page elements.
Your visitors want to know “what’s in it for me?” (WIIFM). Use your CTA copy to spell out, in plain language, exactly what they will get if they click the CTA button. Make sure your CTA is one of the most visible elements on your ppc landing page. We suggest running multivariate tests to compare button color, shape and white space around the CTA, to make incremental optimizations for improved conversion rates.
Gain Credibility
Most people exercise extreme caution during the buying process, especially when it comes to online products. Build trust with your visitors with symbols that legitimize your business like trade associations, media mentions, a logo garden, safe-checkout logos, and customer testimonials.
Visitors who click-thru to your PPC landing page are meeting you for the first time; you need to nail your first impression. When you meet someone for the first time you rely on social queues to judge whether a person is trustworthy or not. Use your landing page real estate to alleviate weariness with relevant statistics and testimonials.
Testimonials are a powerful method to dispel product or service objections. In addition, testimonials have been proven to increase conversions and significantly influence purchase-decisions. People want to hear from people, not businesses trying to sell them a product. Customer testimonials feel human, genuine and validate your product or service.
Having specifics in your testimonial can sway users to convert.
What should your testimonial include?
- Use concrete numbers and figures
- Specific benefits from your product. Avoid vague and personal opinions.
- Include a headshot (or at least a name and company) with your customer’s testimonial to create a sense of legitimacy
Add Video Creative
Spice up your landing page and up engagement by adding video. Studies show users are inclined to stay on landing pages with videos for a longer period of time than pages without them.
Videos increase reach to users that prefer to view content rather than read bulky text. Play around with time length of the video and the amounts of detail provided. As a step up from just product shots, show a demo of your product in action, or feature members of your company to humanize your product.
Pro Tip: Utilize your video content by repurposing it. Create new organic traffic by posting it on YouTube or Google. Due to lack of competition, videos are 52 times more likely to show up on the first page of a search engine than a text piece.
We’re Going Mobile
Thanks to mobile’s rapid adoption users now expect convenience at lightning speed and seamless user experience, no matter where they interact with your company. This means your PPC landing page MUST cater to a mobile experience.
Most mobile users encounter problems while browsing so it’s important to smooth over your mobile site before launch.
Most common complaints leading to a dissatisfied visitor & no sale:
- Inability to load: or too slow to load
- Website error: crashing or failure to load
- Illegible format
- Incompatibly with mobile devices
Visitors are not willing to tolerate sluggish landing pages. Every second counts: the longer the loading time, the more likely users are to abandon your page. Nearly 50% of users expect a page to load in two seconds. Even a single second of delay can cost you 7% of possible conversions.
Optimize your landing pages’ speed and mobile capabilities.
Here are a few questions you want to ask yourself when building your mobile-optimized PPC landing page:
- Is your content visible on mobile?
- Flash, PNG-24, and many other plug-ins make content inaccessible from mobile devices. Instead, use HTML5, jQuery, or JPGs so your content is easily rendered on a mobile device.
- Does your PPC landing page scale to size?
- Use responsive web design to deliver and scale content based on the device a visitor is using to access your landing page.
- Do you have a ‘click-to-call’ CTA?
- Include a phone icon, call-to-action (e.g. ‘Call Now’), and an incentive in exchange for the call (e.g. promotional rate guaranteed).
- Can visitors easily click on your CTAs and/or links?
- Make sure every clickable element is thumb-friendly.
- For most devices, clickable areas should be between 38×38 pixels and 44×44 pixels.
Pro Tip: Add padding to your links and insert margins between clickable links to avoid misclicks. Also, use plug-ins with touch swipe gestures.
- How many fields are in your form?
- In general, longer forms lead to lower conversion rates, but this is even more true on mobile. Some even estimate a 50% decrease in conversion rates when using long forms in a mobile context.
- How fast is your mobile experience?
- Data on your mobile-optimized landing pages must be lightweight — keep data under 20 kilobytes to ensure pages load in 5 seconds or less.
Takeaways
Use these 5 landing page optimizations to get started with your incremental conversion increases.
Test these five steps to lure in potential new leads:
- Keep it consistent.
- Use the same keyword across your PPC ad and landing page
- Couple strong CTA copy with eye-catching design
- Build trust and credibility with symbols and testimonials
- Increase engagement with product explainer videos.
- Adapt content to the mobile experience