6 ways to improve your ppc landing pages
Landing pages offer conversion opportunities. In fact, research showed that brands who increased their number of landing pages from 10 to 15 percent saw a 55 percent increase in leads. Although landing pages are a crucial element of driving conversions, effectively optimising them is a common challenge we see marketers face.
In this blog and the below infographic, we cover six methods of improving your landing pages to make the most out of your PPC investment and the traffic your campaigns are driving.
how to improve your landing page experience to increase conversions
integrate social proof on your landing page
If you’ve not heard of social proof before, it’s a method of building trust and converting users by showcasing first-hand reviews, ratings and user-generated content direct from your customers on your site. Powerful and persuasive, our clients have seen an average conversion rate increase of 17 percent by simply adding social proof to their landing pages.
By fostering trust on your landing pages, you can influence a user to convert by providing the validation required to make a conversion decision. Social proof could be integrated on your landing page in a number of ways such as the use of a well-known review platform like TrustPilot. If you want to find out more about social proof and the many ways it can be applied to a website, our connected agency, Statement, wrote an extensive blog on the topic.
decrease your landing page load time
There’s no point in a landing page being designed for conversions if it doesn’t load fast enough for the user. A slow-loading landing page can be a real conversion killer, particularly for mobile which takes on average 87 percent longer to load than desktop.
With 47 percent of consumers expecting websites to load in two seconds or less and 40 percent abandoning a page that takes three or more seconds to load, your page speed can have a big impact on your conversions.
We encourage our clients to check their landing page speed on both mobile and desktop. If you’re suffering from a slow load time, there could be a number of elements that can help speed things up including:
removing additional Javascript or unused code on your website
minimising high-resolution image sizes
changing web hosting provider or your web hosting package
build landing pages for specific audiences
Your PPC team should conduct keyword research to source valuable and high converting keywords to include in the content on your landing pages. Taking this one step further, there’s no shame in creating specific landing pages for a specific audience using relevant keywords. For example, a fashion brand such as Levis may have a generic PPC landing page for their clothing alongside a landing page focused on ‘Women’s Jeans’ and one on ‘Men’s Jeans’.
Taking this approach ensures that your landing pages better satisfy individual users and reflect what your ad is offering which helps to create an improved user experience. If Google can recognise the content and keyword relevancy in line with user’s search intent, the search engine will award you a higher quality score which can help to reduce your CPC.
If you do choose to create specific landing pages for specific audiences, keep in mind that the user will change so content and page structure may need to be altered to reflect this.
optimise your landing page text
While your aim may not be to create a landing page for organic ranking purposes, it’s still important to maintain SEO best practice to ensure a structured, easy to engage with landing page experience.
This includes:
keeping your headlines under 60 characters. For PPC purposes, we advise using 30 for headline 1 and 30 for headline 2.
conducting extensive keyword research to understand which keywords are relevant to each stage of the user journey or marketing funnel.
using title tags, H1s and H2s to split out your on-page content for an easier to digest landing page.
do you need a navigation bar?
When creating a landing page for PPC purposes, navigation is not necessarily important. In fact, it could be deterring your users away from converting.
For example, if you were to create a landing page for organic purposes such as to rank highly on the SERPs for a specific keyword, it’s important to give the user a choice. This will encourage them to scroll through your page and continue engaging with the website.
However, for a PPC landing page, you are paying for the traffic to come to that specific page. As a result, you don’t want the user to land on your page, only to become distracted by a navigation bar which then navigates them away to another place on your site. Instead, you should focus on keeping your PPC landing page design sleek and simple with the limelight on the conversion point/CTA.
test and learn
Results fuel further action. The best way to get the most from your landing pages is to launch, test, learn and optimise. By testing various factors including device compatibility, operation systems and browsers, you’re fuelled with insight to make better decisions based on data. Using this insight, you can continuously refine and optimise your landing pages to ensure a positive experience for each user.
how can cro improve your conversion rate?
CRO is a proven technique used to generate the maximum return from your PPC investment and the traffic your campaigns are driving.
But more than that, your landing page experience can actually impact your quality score and conversion rate. Your user’s quality of experience on your landing page plays a key role in determining your quality score. Your quality score affects your cost-per-click (CPC) which, in turn, affects your ROI. By improving your quality score, you can work towards improving your ROI and lowering your CPC.
As a result, it’s hugely beneficial to analyse and spot opportunities where your landing page can be improved to drive more conversions. Using our in-house developed Landing Page Opportunity tool, we can find where our conversion rate optimisation services could uplift performance while getting the most from your budget and existing traffic.
Do you want to know if your landing pages could be working harder for your business? Get in touch with our CRO experts to find out how your landing pages are performing and how we can improve them to increase your conversions.
