Pay Per Click Advertising

Landing Pages

The first rule of PPC is never send the users to your home page. As Heather Lloyd-Martin comments on in her article entitled ‘Four Hot PPC Landing Page Tips for Sizzling Site Conversions’;

“Good thing: Customers clicking on your ad and hitting your site. Bad thing: Customers hitting your home page and then frantically searching for the product information you promised them in the first place.”

My preference has always been to have a small number (5 or 6) of ad-specific landing page that relate to the strengths of each of the individual text ads. For example people who click on an advert that is heavily price orientated should be directed to a page that is more geared towards the pricing of the products, similarly people who click on ads that use the ‘buy direct’ tag line should be directed to a landing page which plays to that strength.

Creating an effective PPC landing page is very different to creating an effective organic landing page, this is because the average PPC user is different from the average organic user and as a result the page’s format and functions need to be tailored to suit this new groups needs. Below I have listed some of the main design elements that we will need to adhere to when creating our landing pages or micro-sites;

  • Don’t have too many calls to action. As I’ve mentioned the average PPC user is different from their organic counterpart, two such differences are patience and time. Research shows that when provided with a number of calls to action (buttons linking to other pages/functions) becomes larger than 2 or 3, conversion rates suffer dramatically. In short it’s essential that we eliminate everything that doesn’t contribute to achieving our goal: visual clutter, primary navigation, additional clicks, lengthy marketing fluff, etc. As Rich McIver notes in his article entitled ‘9 Common Mistakes in Landing Page and PPC Campaign Design’:

    “While you might be inclined to think that offering users the opportunity to sign up for your newspaper, give you a call, send you a fax, sign up for your RSS feed are all good things, they create confusion and a paradox of choice for the visitor.”

  • Give your user options. No I’m not just trying to confuse you I’m aware of the previous point but I do not mean give them lots of separate options, I mean give them lots of routes to convert the same options; some people click text links, some choose buttons, others prefer images. Make it as easy as possible for each of these sets of people.

  • Ensure your calls to action are not below the fold. Below the fold, in SEO terms refers to being on that part of the page that a user needs to scroll down to see, for example if you’re searching on Google all of the results from around number 5 onwards would be considered below the fold as the user will have to scroll down to see them. The term is derived from the newspaper industry where it was found that headlines and stories beneath the halfway fold were less likely to be seen or read than those above it. Returning to the web though, research suggests that a staggering 30% of people will move on to a new page if they cannot find what they want without scrolling.

  • Include testimonials. Testimonials dramatically increase landing page conversions because they indicate to the user that the form is legitimate and completes the promise it makes. It’s obvious that a testimonial can be faked, but a casual internet user doesn’t think quite so cynically and will regard testimonials as a quality assurance indicator.

  • Avoid using lots of unneeded text. Keep the text on the page short and formatted for quick scanning rather than in-depth reading.

  • Avoid using Flash, video, or other ‘plug-in required’ design elements. Without putting too finer point on it people clicking on PPC links are not typically the most sophisticated internet users and as I’ve mentioned nor do are they likely to have the patience or time to deal with installing a new plug-in or waiting for some fancy video to load. Again as Rich McIver notes;

    “Rule of thumb: If your grandma connecting through a dial-up
    on her Pentium I 586 can’t quickly see and complete your call to action, its too complex.”

  • Offer an incentive. Offer visitors something of value to them in exchange for a conversion. My recommendation on these for by 10% off or something along those lines.

  • Include your phone number. It’s inevitable that some visitors will still prefer to place an order over the phone rather than online, make this easy for them.