So, you’re getting good click-through rates on your Pay Per Click advertising campaign. So why isn’t your conversion rate going up as well? You might be making one of the top 5 landing page mistakes:
1) Using Your Home Page as the Landing Page
This is the biggest (and most common) mistake you can make with PPC campaigns – you must always have a customized landing page for each keyword that you run ads on. You’ve gotten people to click using the right keywords; they now expect to find information about what they were searching on.
If you don’t have a landing page customized to those search terms, they’ll click the ‘back’ button and be on to one of your competitor’s sites.
2) Having a Confusing/Too Busy Landing Page
If your landing page is not clear and concise, leading the user to exactly the information that they’re looking for, you will lose sales. People don’t have much patience to try and figure out where the information they want is.
You may want to put as much information about your product/service on the landing page as possible, but remember that clarity is key. Your potential customer should be able to find all the information they need about your product in 30 seconds. You can definitely have more information available, but they should be able to pick out key points immediately.
3) Your Landing Page Takes Too Long to Load
Images are always a great way to improve the look and layout of your landing page. Go overboard, however, and you’ll lose customers before they even get to your site. This is because putting too many images on your landing page will result in your site taking an extremely long time to load. People will get sick of waiting, click that dreaded ‘back’ button again, and move on the to next search result.
Instead, focus on the quality, not the quantity of images. Hand select a few that will really improve the look of your site. Also, keep the size of the image in mind as well. You don’t need to use a high resolution picture if it’s meant to only be seen online. You can save the picture as at a lower resolution and speed up the loading time of your landing page that much more.
4) Scaring Away Your Customers
Asking your potential customers to provide private information before telling them anything about your product/service will only result in scaring them away. Remember, people don’t like to give out their private information to people they don’t know. Build trust with them first, and if you must ask for private information right away, limit it to a first name and an email address. Then, you still get a way to send them more information, and they get to retain some anonymity.
5) You’re spending all your time selling
Don’t misunderstand this; your goal is to ultimately sell your product or service. But you must understand that people don’t respond to the hard sell. They go to the internet for information, so give it to them. Save the sales pitch for your PPC ad; once they’ve clicked on it, they’ve already expressed interest in the product.
Once they get to the landing page, you then need to provide them with the information they need to feel like they’ve been educated on the product/service, and now can make an informed decision. This will also build their trust in your site, since you’re not trying to give them an obvious sales pitch; you’re merely presenting the information and letting them make their own decision.
Landing Page Optimization: The Definitive Guide to Testing and Tuning for Conversions
Effective Internet marketing requires that you test and optimize your landing pages to maximize exposure and conversion rate. This second edition of a bestselling guide to landing page optimization includes case studies with before-and-after results as well as new information on web site usability. It covers how to prepare all types of content for testing, how to interpret results, recognize the seven common design mistakes, and much more.
