How’s your landing page… landing with your customers?

So, you’re running some great ads as part of your campaign – text-based search on Google and some visual HTML5 ads on Google Discovery, as well as a few videos on Meta. They might be officially the best ads ever made – but, you’re losing those all-important leads as soon as your audience clicks through to your landing page. So, what’s going on?

Here at Arke, we’re all about our clients getting the best possible bang for their buck when it comes to online advertising. And it doesn’t just stop with said online advertising. Thinking about your potential customers’ journeys leads us to the landing page that you’re directing them toward. How effective is it? Are people abandoning your proposition after excitedly clicking on your ads?

Here are 10 factors to consider when putting your landing page together for your next campaign.

Heads up

Ensure that all of the important visuals, copy, forms and buttons appear above the fold (the visible part of the webpage before the user scrolls down), so that people don’t have to scroll down to get to the action. A key part of landing page design is making everything as easy as possible for your potential customers – reducing friction by making it a smooth customer journey. So if you have time-poor customers, keep it short, and have everything important above the fold, reducing the need to scroll down a complex page is one way to make it easier for your potential customers.

Be clear with your message

Your offering should be part of a big headline ideally, so there is no ambiguity about what this page is all about. Whatever you’re hoping your potential customer to do, whether it be to:

download a resource,
enter a competition,
buy a product
sign up for a service

… you need to be clear about what your proposal is. As well as that headline, make sure that all the key information is also present, accompanying your form or call to action button.

Picture this

On the subject of being clear, make sure your landing page includes a visual to entice the audience – what will they get if they click on the button? What are they signing up for if they give their details? You might want to be more literal, rather than conceptual, depending on the nature of your business.

All one big happy family

Your landing page should look in line with your ads – working as part of the same campaign, so that users feel they are in the right, intended place, and importantly don’t feel they’ve been misled, which could cause users to ‘bounce’ straight off the page! The ad that has led the user here will need to match with the landing page – they should be ‘of a piece’. If it were solely text, then the copy should be in the same tone of voice. If it were a visual, then the same brand look-and-feel should be present, so the landing page is a continuation of the same campaign.

No distractions

Keep top navigation and distracting links to a minimum. You probably have a great website, with a huge range of information and offerings, but you want to keep your users captivated with the offering at hand, rather than tempting them to click away to read a funny blog post. You want to be showcasing this one particular aspect of your business – this landing page’s key offering – not leading the potential customer to get lost in other parts of your site.

Small is beautiful

Ensure it is mobile-friendly and will work as well on a mobile device – so that you’re not neglecting a proportion of your audience. Everything needs to work for the visitors using their phones, so test your landing page to check it behaves as expected when using a tablet or smartphone.

4 out of 5 dentists

Numbers are always good 🙂 – do you have a snappy stat that proves how great your service is? Get it up there on the landing page. Furthermore – do you use TrustPilot or something similar? Perhaps include some of the best reviews – make sure you adhere to policies regarding transparency, and linking to ALL reviews for parity!

Testing, testing 1 2 testing

Could you be testing several headlines, or several visuals to see which performs best? There are plenty of services that offer Dynamic optimisation – could you employ something similar, to make sure that the best-performing elements of your landing page are used more frequently?

The devil’s in the details

If you’ve got forms, keep them short, and perhaps user dropdowns rather than free text fields to speed up a potential customer submitting their information. Also, think about what these forms do – if they are to book a call, do users submit and then have to wait for you to get in touch? Why not make this even easier for the user by including a link directly to an online booking system to book the call in at a time and date to suit them best?

Please and thank-yous 🙂

Do you need a page saying thank you to someone having submitted their details, ensuring that the potential customer knows that you’ve got their vital statistics? The message could include the next steps you’ll take, keeping them in the loop. Importantly, this page might be a vital part of you recording your audience’s interactions with your site – affecting your all-important metrics! (Roll on bonus!)

So to summarise:

Make sure your key content is appearing above the fold
Be super clear with your messaging
Back up your messaging with clear imagery of your offering
Ensure your ads and landing page match visually
Keep menus, navigation and links to a minimum to avoid distractions
Keep different screen sizes (like mobiles) in mind when designing (heck – you might even want to design the page mobile first if your audience is likely to all be using smartphones!)
Back up your messaging with stats and reviews if possible
Meaningful testing is only going to help improve your landing page’s performance
Try to keep forms short (a tough balance when everyone wants EVERY crumb of information they can ever get, but use your judgement!)
Let your users know when they’ve completed the intended interaction successfully! And a thank-you doesn’t hurt!