Landing Page Design
Using a landing page to increase response
The biggest mistake made today by PPC advertisers is to send traffic directly to their home page. This leaves you with very little ability to track the visitor once they have arrived at your site.
More importantly, it gives your prospects a lot of opportunity to decide not to contact you. Consider a few of the reasons they might not contact you:
- They might decide against your offer before they even know what it is
- They could find your site too difficult to use and give up
- The phone could ring and they could get distracted
- Someone could show up at their desk needing to talk to them
- Their computer could crash
- They could follow a link. from your site to another site and forget about you
- Survivor could come on
- and many more reasons...
Most people spend less than 2 minutes at company web sites. Do you really want to spend your hard earned dollars sending people to a website where most will spend less than a minute and never even see your offer? That's like dumping your advertising budget into a black hole.
Luckily there is a better way! PPC advertising is not simply a way to get more traffic to your site. You are paying for a well qualified prospect to see your offer. Rather than dumping the user on your home page, send them directly to your offer with a well crafted offer or landing page.
On the landing page, the only way out is to buy your product, register for your newsletter, or use the back button! Doing this with your site could easily increase your results by 10x. As mentioned, you can maximize your results by creating a focused offer page (called a landing page in the web marketing industry.)
This landing page should present all the benefits of the product or service quickly and use a compelling headline at the top of the page to "grab" the attention of the reader. How do you know how well your landing page is working? By measuring it of course.
Only by using a "post- click" measurement system will you know the true effectiveness of your landing page, and be able to express that effectiveness as your return on investment. By recording measurements of performance over time, you will begin to spot trends in the market and see how changes you make to your landing page affect and improve its performance.
Making changes is exactly what you will need to do if you want to improve your performance over time. Have you ever looked at two billboards and wondered which one garnered a higher response rate? This would be virtually impossible to learn.
You may also wonder this about your website... "Is the new homepage design really better than the old?" Do you know if your customers would respond to "Take advantage of this free offer by signing up now," or "FREE OFFER, sign up now?" The only way to know the answer is by testing both approaches and comparing the results.
There are two ways to test: “The one after another method”: trying one approach for a month, then the other for a month and comparing results. And by running the campaigns simultaneously. Testing at the same time is the preferred method as it rules out environmental factors which could affect consumer response to your offer.
