Ads and Website UX

A common issue we see with brands and organisations that come to Arke in search of better results for their marketing campaigns is a disconnect among the touchpoints their audiences have with their brand.

But, what do we mean by that? Read on as Matt, Arke’s Head of Creative, explains how we must consider the entire brand ecosystem and its intention when developing a marketing strategy for each of our clients.

Let’s start with a simple but recurring scenario.

Do your ads match your landing page?

Are they speaking the same language visually? If they don’t, you could be facing some serious trust issues with your audiences. We’re not talking data, URLs, and databases; we’re talking about how things look.

The press is telling us that trust in advertising is high right now, with reports saying that the ‘enjoyment’ of ads is behind it. But, before we even get to the topic of enjoyment in marketing, there’s that key word: trust.

Have you ever clicked on an ad and been taken to somewhere completely different on the internet?

Looks different, feels different… making you wonder what you just clicked on. This is exactly what you want to avoid when promoting your brand.

If we’re putting together a path that you want a potential customer to take, we must consider the user journey. No sudden moves or pesky surprises, please!

Here at Arke, we run paid media ad campaigns on a variety of platforms, and, as with all branded items, consistency is key, and in a time when Gen-AI creatives are popping all over, and we’re all looking for effective ways to adopt it into our workflow, consistency becomes especially crucial.

Our thinking is that AI can help you diversify your creative offering, and it could even allow you to produce assets that otherwise would’ve been out of reach or budget, but having some metaphorical guardrails is of the utmost importance.

We cannot let images and videos get too astray from the look and feel of your landing page, as it’ll erode your hard-earned trust. You also can’t afford to have your brand turning up at different times wearing completely different clothes without an exceptional reason.

Let’s put ourselves in the shoes of your target customer

When people are being served up ads, and being urged to click on them to learn more, book something, or part with their hard-earned cash by purchasing your product, we want to make sure that the place they’re taken to is presentable, and ‘of a piece’ with the ad they’ve just seen.

What’s the worst that could happen if this is not the case?

Let me spell out the words that you hear in your nightmares:

Bounce rate: 100% 🙁
Conversion rate: big fat zero 😱

Now your ads might be great: they might be perfectly on brand, have a clear proposition, feature a compelling hook, be ideal for the platform they’re running on, and generate plenty of click-throughs, but still fail to deliver the conversions you want.

That could likely be down to where your ad is taking the user. We always look at your UX with fresh eyes when planning or optimising your marketing strategy by putting your ads and landing page side-by-side to analyse and enhance the user journey based on the available resources.

Considering the landing page you’re directing people to, we check that it complements the ads you’ve created. Your ads have to feel authoritative and confident, never misleading and deceptive. So thinking about what they’re leading to is the key here. Is there a disconnect? Do the visuals align by using similar colours, fonts and photos? And, is the content relevant? There’s nothing worse than being promised one thing and landing on something completely different.

Online marketing has historically been stained with dark patterns, deceptive UIs and brands making it difficult for customers to stop using their services. This is why it’s so essential to have a clear and transparent way for users to understand and feel identified with your brand or organisation.

When the goal is for browsers to become customers, users need to be given the breathing space to make their own decision without feeling pressured, without feeling misled, and the relationship between your ads and the landing page they’re taken to can really affect that.

There are even visual conventions about this requirement for brand coherence, which basically means that if the relationship between elements is closer visually, people will feel more confident dwelling there. A consistent look drives conversion.

Browsers and potential customers are making judgments about your brand subconsciously in seconds, in fact, as little as 50 milliseconds, and the visuals play a huge part in that.

How does Arke integrate the UX for your brand?

We’ve developed integrated marketing campaigns for multiple clients across several market sectors. Aligning creatives, ad targeting and landing pages to break records that have earned us multiple award wins over the years.

A great example of this is the work we have done with the British Film Institute Player, where we achieved a 729% increase in YoY trialists in their peak season and a 52% trial to subscription conversion rate. A key part of our work involved aligning the creatives we devised to better reflect the pages potential subscribers were being taken to by the advertising.

The Key Takeaway

Your brand can be felt on your website, your ads, your social media profiles, everywhere. None of these can be treated in isolation as they’re all part of the same user journey.

The most creative and imaginative ad will not convert if your landing page feels like a separate, non-aligned entity. That’s where the importance of having a team that understands how each touch point contributes to transforming a browser into a customer lies.

Being named the UK’s Most Effective Agency for three years in a row is the best recognition of how our integrated marketing strategies perform for our clients.

Interested in elevating your brand? Let’s have a chat and explore how we can help you achieve your goals.