Landing Page Optimization Best Practices
I feel the landing page is one of the most under-appreciated aspects of advertising. We spend so much time thinking about amazing advertising, marketing tactics, audiences, budgets and measuring our ads, that we forget the destination has a HUGE impact in overall performance.
Think about it! Why spend thousands and thousands on an ad campaign just to drive people to an uninspiring web page that doesn’t connect at all to the campaign? I’ve had too many presentations from marketing teams that fell flat when I asked them where we were driving traffic.
“We’re sending people to your site.”
“Where on the site?”
“Not sure, probably the homepage or a collection.”
This has always been a huge red flag for me. If you haven’t thought at all about where you’re sending people and how you’re going to convert them, you're almost guaranteed to underperform in your advertising.
Below are some quick tips I’ve assembled on landing page optimization. Having done hundreds of campaigns, these are the priority things to consider. But I encourage people to do their own testing and learn what works best for their customers. If you haven’t looked already, review my content on LIFT Principles which I’ll reference during this article.
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Relevance - Connect with Your Marketing
Overcome: Am I at the Right Place?
By neglecting to make landing pages, ads and posts often drive to existing website content, which is almost certainly not going to match. Good ads are precise to a need and a target customer, where many evergreen web pages are designed as catch-alls for any type of customer. So step one with a good landing page is ensuring it matches the intent and design of your ads.
If I arrive at the page and I’m not seeing anything that resembles what I just clicked on a moment before, there’s a stronger chance I’m going to bounce. You shouldn’t try to be subtle about this either, you have mere moments to connect and retain a new visitor.
Do I see the same product or image I just saw in the ad?
Does the brand match?
Do the campaign colours match?
Distraction - Focus on Delivering on your Promise
Overcome: Where is what I was interested in?
A dedicated landing page has hyper focused on the customer and their need. So as an example, if your ad was for elite hockey skates, but you direct people to a page of 200 skates, you’re now asking the customer to do the work. You brought them in for a purpose, do the next step of delivering them to the right place.
Expert Advice: Conquesting
Conquesting is advertising against your competitors keywords or branding. This is usually expensive and designed to intercept a customer’s specific search. By creating a tailored landing page and ads about why you’re superior to that product is a potentially high-value opportunity.
We need our landing page to be free from distractions. No other products or information that doesn’t pertain specifically to that audience and their needs.
Don’t make the customer search for what they came for.
Remove all other distractions from the page that don’t support that purchase.
Reduce additional navigation items that may cause journey abandonment.
Conversion - Make the Next Step Easy
Overcome: Where do I buy?
It may seem obvious, but providing points for conversion through call to actions need to be present, and throughout the page. You don’t know at what point a customer may be ready for the next step, so present them with the option. That doesn’t mean you need a ‘buy now’ button every scroll, but after major sections, provide them with an opportunity to start a trial or get free shipping.
Present conversion CTAs after each major content section.
Use language that helps break down any objections a customer may have.
Optimization - The Constant State of Improvement
Overcome: Set it and Forget it.
This step is about overcoming our nature as marketers to set things and forget them. Landing pages are perfect opportunities for proving the different designs of your content.
Have your current page run against a variation, which is easy to set up with something like Google Optimize. This enables you to split your traffic across both versions simultaneously. This can be run with continuous updates of performance that you can track until you get statistical significance.
Expert Advice: Testing
It’s not always possible to run campaigns long enough to get the traffic required for a true statistical significance. You can reduce your threshold for certainty or use a Bayesian model to expedite. Even without this degree, I still believe you can learn valuable insights from your landing page test.
I’m of the mind that every landing page should be accompanied by a test whenever possible. Over time, you start to build greater understanding of what performs and what doesn’t. Each iteration of your page will become more precise, and performance will improve.
Key Takeaways
The moral of my story here is to always have a tailored destination for your campaigns. There are simple ways to get there even if you don’t have a lot of internal resources, so I encourage marketers to think of your destinations in tandem with your campaign.
