Best Landing Page Practices

The best landing pages are exactly that – landing pages.

Not your home page, not your contact page, but a customized page that makes the same offer you’ve made in your AdWords campaign.

Think about it like this: If someone sees an ad for Product A in your AdWords campaign and the ad sends them to your home page, which sells Product A through Z, how likely are they to still buy Product A?

Not very likely.

So, your AdWords landing page must first meet the initial expectation of prospects – that it make the same offer as the ad they clicked on – and no other offers.

Some other things that will contribute to better conversion rates include:

How clear you make the value of your offer. Don’t leave it up to your prospect to determine if your offer is of value to them. Tell them the value in a way that is clear, concise and reasonable.

How easy you make it for your prospects to take action. For example, don’t create a form that asks for information you don’t really need. If you’re offering an e-book, you don’t need a physical address, so don’t ask for it.

How you make prospects feel at ease over giving you their personal information. Tell people their information is safe with you. It only takes a sentence, but can make a huge difference. Don’t overlook this factor.

I see people make a lot of the same mistakes over-and-over when it comes to landing pages. Here are a few of the common ones that you should look out for:

Not Using a Landing Page at All
This one may seem obvious to some, but I still see it far too often. In the vast majority of cases cases, you can’t realistically carry an offer from AdWords to your home page. There are too many competing offers, links and other things to distract your visitor from your original offer.

Making Too Many Offers
I’ve seen people try to use the same landing page for multiple offers in the name of saving money. Unfortunately, the opposite is true – they lose money. They lose money on the designer they hired to create the page and they lose money on clicks they’ve paid for in AdWords.

Landing Page Design That Confuses Prospects
When you pay a professional to design an AdWords landing page, it can be easy for that designer to get too creative and over-design your page.

I can’t tell you how important it is to have a proper landing page for visitors who come to your site from Google. Landing pages that are well-designed and have appropriate offers and calls to action will always have better results.

If you have any questions, I’m here to help. Whether you have a landing page you want reviewed, or you just need some help figuring out the best way to design your AdWords landing page, I can guide you through the process and get you from click to conversion in no time.

Below is a 60 minute presentation by the great people at Marketing Experiments about landing pages and how clarity trumps persuasion.  Mandarich.com is a certified landing page company by marketing experiments.  I highly recommend their scientific approach to online marketing.