Landing pages are an essential part of all of your marketing efforts and should be utilized with almost every medium that you use.
Simply, a landing page is the first page a user gets to when they visit your site. However, as marketers, we use landing pages a little bit more distinctively.
Landing pages allow you to give your digital users a clear path from what they clicked on to get to your site.
For example, if I searched for a “plumber” on Google, click on an ad that read, “Get Help from Certified Plumbers,” and am sent to a page about technicians, I will likely leave to find a website that takes me to a page about plumbers – what I was originally searching for.
Utilizing landing pages allows you to avoid this possibility and customize your landing pages to fit the overarching campaign you are trying to implement whether that’s for organic campaigns or paid campaigns.
Now, you can use the same landing page for your organic campaigns as your paid campaigns – keyword “can”; that doesn’t mean you should.
Having custom landing pages for your paid media campaigns allows you to align your landing page with the messaging of your paid campaign regardless of the platform you are advertising on. Utilizing landing pages for your digital advertising efforts is paramount in offering an experience to a potential user that will entice them to take the desired action on your website.
User experience (UX) is extremely important when it comes to landing pages because, ultimately, if you don’t please them, you lose all influence of your site.
To start optimizing for user experience, think about yourself as a user and what would you want to see on your landing page.
Think about important keywords the user might be searching for; provide them with extensive content around those keywords and make it compelling enough to keep them on your site.
With the content on your landing page, you can entice the user to perform an action on your landing page, like filling out a form.
Whether you are offering a content piece for them to download or offering a free demo of your product or service, you want to make sure that the content shows the user why they need this offer and encourage them to take your desired action.
There are so many ways that you can optimize your landing pages, but one very important thing to do is A/B test what is working best. A/B tests are a way to test multiple different options of one page to see which one drives the better results.
If you are running Google Ads, you can look at your metrics within the Google Ads tool to see whether there are any adjustments that you need to make to – as I like to say – “make Google happy.”
Some of these adjustments include having more of a correlation from your paid keywords to the information on your landing page to help improve your quality score.
With landing pages, you can make changes that minimize distractions and keep the user interacting with your landing page.
For example, you can remove your main menu from your landing page so that the user focuses on the content and conversion point you are offering.
You also don’t want to have many (or any, if possible) buttons or links leading away from your landing page (unless you are sending them to another relevant landing page that offers more content and a similar conversion point).
Utilizing dedicated landing pages for your digital advertising campaign allows you to effectively track how your paid traffic is interacting with your landing page.
This will allow you to analyze what specifically is or is not working for your paid traffic so you then can go back to point three on this list to optimize different aspects of your landing page.
If you are having a problem with your conversion rate, maybe you need to take a look at your form and ask yourself: Are you asking for too much of the user’s information?
Try shortening the amount of required for fields that user has to fill out. If you are having a problem with a low time on site, you might need to test out adding more, relevant content for the user to mull over.
Using dedicated landing pages for all of your digital advertising efforts is essential to track, optimize, and encourage action on your landing pages. Don’t forget to run A/B tests to figure out what works best for your paid users!