Landing Pages for Higher Paid Search and Sponsored Ad to Prospect Conversions
All high lead-converting digital marketing adverts have one key ingredient in common, an optimised landing page.
That’s not to discount the essential elements of the ad itself. You still need a compelling copy, appealing artwork; and a clear call-to-action (CTA)—but that’s only the start.
Think of your advert as the fly on the hook, and your landing page as the reel. You need both to catch a fish. The advert lures, while the reel brings that yummy new lead back to shore. In this post, we’re taking a look at landing pages and their role in the customer journey to grow your sales funnel.
What Is A Landing Page?
A landing page is a standalone web page that is designed to achieve one goal in an advertising campaign. Generally, this is to capture a lead. It’s where a potential buyer submits their email address and enters the sales funnel as a prospect.
Why can’t I just send traffic to any other page on my website?
Sending ad traffic to your home page is like beckoning passers-by into your store only to leave them at the entrance. As the name suggests, a landing page is where a potential customer “lands” after they’ve clicked on an advert. Between the lines, it says, “welcome, you came from X because you’re interested in Y. Let me take you there.”
Why Landing Pages Work
Landing pages are not the same as organic web pages (least not the home page). They are specifically designed for the sole purpose of guiding a viewer to the CTA. That’s why a landing page deliberately lacks navigation (a menu), emphasizes benefits or results and has the equivalent of bright, neon lights telling the viewer what they need to do next. This could be completing a contact form, booking a consultation, or exchanging their email address for a lead magnet.
The Benefits of a Landing Page
-
Increase Ad-To-Sales Conversions
An ad can’t (or seldom ever does) make the sale. It generates interest. Closing the deal generally requires some relationship building. The landing page is where the reader grants consent for you to start a one-on-one conversion by submitting their contact details. Thus, enabling you to close more deals. -
Improve Tracking and Ad Attribution
Landing pages are the perfect mechanisms to track how specific ad campaigns are performing. By having a dedicated page per campaign, your normal (free) website analytics will tell you the traffic source, how long they spent on the page and if they completed the goal—as a start. -
Enhanced Advertising Placement and Design Decisions
It doesn’t end! Landing pages lend themselves to A/B split testing of ads, campaigns and the pages themselves. Apply heat mapping, play with layout, colour schemes, and different CTA’s to get the most bang for your advertising buck! -
Drive Specific Business Goals
While an organic web page plays multiple roles, a landing page fulfils only one. It sends a visitor down a specific path to your desired outcome: subscribe; take the survey; refer a friend; enter the competition.
There’s a landing page for every objective:- Build your database
- Fill your sales pipeline
- Gain customer feedback
- Grow brand awareness
-
Higher Return on Investment (ROI) On Digital Marketing Spend
As landing pages help to increase conversion rates, they essentially give you higher ROI on your adverts. There’s more. They reduce the bounce rate on other web pages because visitors are sent to the right page. This also means you’re reducing negative experiences for potential clients (from being directed to a disorientating page). Overall, this targeted approach helps to increase website stats, which improves your site authority and results in page ranking. Making your holistic digital marketing spend go further.
BONUS Benefit: Contributes to Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
Consider this a fortunate spin-off; landing pages can improve your search engine optimisation (SEO). You’d never create a landing page for SEO purposes, but, you optimise the page for SEO. After all, it should already contain all the right [key] words**. Make every ad-click count! Set up high-converting landing pages
*Pure eCommerce aside.
** There are two schools of thought around publishing landing pages. One believes “No index. No, Follow” because the page’s purpose is to support the ad and the tracking data should remain pure. The other believes that there’s no harm in submitting the page for indexing. If set up correctly, the meta tags and other metadata simply makes it act as another organic page. Either option will only give you marginal SEO gains.