In the midst of a global crisis, it’s important to focus on the positives. And from an agency perspective, we can’t help but notice that right now eCommerce is booming. Not surprising really! With more people at home than ever before, unable to physically shop, online solutions are coming out on top. And for businesses who already have an eCommerce platform in place, there is a window of opportunity for focusing on optimising to get conversions and making the most out of this surge in demand.
But right now, as many businesses are cutting costs by reducing ad spend, there is more scope and less competition for businesses to make a dent in the PPC landscape.
It also means there has never been a better time to invest in Paid Activity.
In 2019 Google Ads saw a record-breaking total revenue of 134 billion USD up from 116 billion in 2018 and we’re sure that will only grow in 2020.
So if you’re looking to get the most of your paid activity; you need to know how to get the most of your budget. How? By lowering the cost per click, driving more users to your site and improving conversion rates to maximise the return on ad spend. Sounds easy right? We know that the best way to achieve this is by paying close attention to landing pages used in your paid campaigns. We quizzed our PPC team to give us their secrets.
So here are our favourite insights for how you can build and optimise the perfect landing pages for your PPC campaigns.
Choosing The Right Landing Page
Depending on your business and the purpose of the campaign; there are a variety of landing pages you can utilise to improve the performance of your paid activity.
It’s important to understand how each type of landing page can be used in different scenarios to better your results. Whether you’re a B2B customer trying to drive leads or an e-commerce site after on-site transactions there's a landing page best suited to your requirements.
Let us talk you through the options.
Lead Capture Landing Pages
The main focus of these landing pages is to gather information from visitors to the site through a form completion.
Ecrubox Tip: You can use these landing pages to gather data for some awesome email campaigns - and that’s how you kill two birds with one stone.
These landing pages are also a great way to offer incentives for signing up, such as a discount on a customer’s first order, or a free consultation. Something that will benefit the users; so entering details doesn’t seem obtrusive because they see the value in what you are offering.
These pages generally have minimal navigational elements with only the sole purpose of collecting data and then a link to the product or service you’re promoting.
Informative Landing Pages
Informative landing pages are designed to give the visitor as much information as possible. They are usually presented as long-form content using infographics, excitable language and packed full of sales techniques.
When it comes to selling users a product or service and making them aware of the benefits there is no better alternative than this type of landing page. Get your users invested into learning about your product before delivering them a clear and concise call to action to bring them into the sales funnel.
Product Detail Landing Pages
This type of landing page is great for e-commerce and retail businesses which have a page dedicated to the details of their product. These pages provide all of the necessary information about the product on sale, from technical specs, to design breakdown.
Product Detail pages are ideal for converting customers who already know which item they want to buy and are now in the research stage of the buyer's journey, looking to find which product will be best suited to their requirements.
Optimising Page Speed
We’re not a fan of slow pages. We know that how quickly your landing page loads has a direct impact on the overall performance of your campaigns. The last thing you want as a marketer is to pay for users to visit your site for them to bounce off before your flashy landing page gets to load due to poor page speed.
The speed in which your page loads doesn’t just affect your bounce rate but also has a direct impact on your conversion rates too with users less likely to convert.
It’s worth noting that you can also improve your quality score for Google Ads by ensuring your landing pages load times are fast across all devices. Improving the quality score of your ads directly impacts the cost you’ll be paying for your target keywords. So making your site as fast as possible will mean you not only will see an increase in conversion rate but also an increase in the amount of traffic getting through to the site. Double win.
No Distractions
Removing any unnecessary navigational elements from your landing page helps to keep the users focused on the end goal of your campaign. By removing the navigational elements you decrease the chance that the users switch out the content they’re consuming for less focused, more generalised content for a wider audience. By keeping them within the landing page you’re ensuring the content being delivered is right for them and the language being used matches their current intent.
Your landing pages should be highly focused and stripped of all distractions which could lead users away from the main objective of your campaign.
Code Academy does this really well, as you can see there is nothing to distract the user from the sign-up form.
Social Proof
One of the key ways to build trust with your audience is to show them social proof through your landing pages.
This can be done in a few different ways which keeps the focus on your product whilst backing up its value from previous customers.
Featuring customer logos of well respected brands that have used your product can help users to feel secure in their purchase knowing that brands they recognise have used your product previously
Testimonials are a powerful way to get across the value of your product to potential customers by delivering quotes from previous buyers who have had a positive experience with your brand and have expressed their gratitude for the benefits it brought to them.
Mentions within the media, if your product has ever been endorsed by a major publication then highlighting that and pointing users to that endorsement is a great way to social proof your product to help build the trust needed ready for purchase.
Now we’ve taken you through some of the best ways for optimising Landing Pages for PPC, you now have the knowledge to create some memorable campaigns that deliver results. Still need more advice and want to chat to our PPC team? Get in touch with us and we’ll be happy to discuss how you can get the most out of digital marketing.
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