Landing pages and CTAs that convert are tough to get right. They can be especially challenging if you collaborate with a large team with many specialists and opinions. As a digital marketer you will encounter this issue. This post addresses the problems and what to look for in solving them.
You have the perfect campaign in mind. You have thought about your audience. Have described your goal, objective, strategy and the tactics you think you want to use. Everyone is on board it seems. It’s go time
But wait a second. The landing page for the campaign ends up in the middle of a fierce debate. There are opposing views over the main objective of the page – even though you may have agreed on it in previous campaign discussions. There may even be confusion around the key performance indicators (KPI) and debate at what stage (Awareness, Consideration or Decision) the campaign is in.
No matter how well you plan, when it comes to the tactics, sometimes consensus gets lost on how we want to meet the customer. This can often be mitigated by thorough briefs outlining your goal, objective, and strategy which should inform tactics. But sometimes there are factors and opinions outside of your control. How then, do you go about it when your marketing team is involved with bringing traffic to the landing page? What input should you offer? This question becomes especially important if you are going to put significant spend behind the page to drive traffic. And that’s where we should start.
Traffic shouldn’t be a KPI on your ad landing pages.
Nope. There is only one exception. If the page is only being created to drive organic traffic, of course traffic matters. Do your SEO checks and let her rip. But if it’s a paid ads page, traffic doesn’t matter one bit. Because if you are paying for traffic, you could have the smiling poop emoji as the featured element on the page and you would still receive the same amount of traffic. You are paying for it. You created an ad and are promising a great page experience. The poop emoji probably did NOT deliver, but there was traffic. So, no matter what, you will get traffic. It’s what the traffic does once it’s there.
KPIs that do matter
If your site speed is good on both mobile and desktop, then you can include/look at overall engagemnt rate. But really, you should be focusing on what the traffic does once it’s there. So even in an awareness campaign, you should focus on conversions, or actions you want to help guide the user to naturally, and of course, engagement. If you are prospecting for instance, is the CTA to share their email strong and sensible? Is there a value in users sharing their email, or are you trying to strong arm them into sharing the email so you can report that “Yes, we are generating prospects!” Don’t forget that humans are engaging with your content – think about the last time you shared an email address with a company. What compelled you to do it?
Look closely at the page you are creating and have one outcome in mind. Make sure you have stripped out navigation. Although you don’t want to “trap” a user on the page, you want to minimize distractions. Your company logo, for instance could lead to the website, or a smaller, less noticeable (secondary CTA) could be situated so that if the user doesn’t feel like becoming a prospect they can head into your site’s wild expanse. But send them somewhere logical – and tell them where you are sending them – and why.
Your landing page won’t work without a compelling CTA
If you create a landing page and then place a button that says “Subscribe” or a “Learn More” don’t expect a great outcome. Unless your offer is free gold, you have got to give your user a reason to take the action you wish them to take.
Many think a simple actionable verb will compel a user to comply, but in the real world, users don’t hand out their email address for just any reason. Today’s consumer is wary and protective of their inbox so you have to make an offer that makes it very, very worth it to them. And this is not easy. Be sure to have content of value to share. Copy that converts, or conversion copy, is an art and genre in and of itself in the copywriting world. Think it through. You might also want to tell them what to expect once they share their info.
This article on conversion copywriting will get you headed in the right direction. I also like its Awareness, Consideration, Decision breakdown of campaign stages.
Here is a great way to start creating a CTA that works by Eden Bidani, a conversion copy expert. I would recommend following her on LinkedIn.
Ad Traffic is a completely different animal than organic traffic
This sometimes seems to confuse folks. Remember that ad traffic is completely different than organic. Ad traffic has been lured off the internet to your page. They had no intention to end up there that day, you pulled them in and promised a good time. A way to think about it is that your ads are a carnival barker on an extremely busy street promising people the right experience if they venture inside your “foyer.” Whether they were looking (search) or were intrigued enough to enter (display, video, discovery, PMax etc.). It’s likely they may not even know who you are. And, again, be sure you give them what you promised.
Organic traffic, on the other hand, arrived there on purpose with stronger intent. Not that organic pages are being let off the hook, but paid landing pages are designed with strangers in mind. This can be a difficult change when you have a feel for your audience and have designed pages in the past for that audience. Landing pages and CTAs throw a lot of what you may know about your audience out the window. Expect to reach a mostly new audience, who again, have no loyalty or reason to trust you and were also not necessarily expecting to be there today. Be prepared to adjust to their needs.
After the launch
Watch those GA4 results and pay attention to engagement (you may need to adjust the default of 10 seconds), scrolls (default 90% but with Google Tag Manager you can set different depths), and clicks. Understand where they are going and again, adjust as necessary. Always follow the data.
One of the hardest projects to initiate is after everyone has worked really hard to get a landing page and a secondary page in place to find out they are not working as expected. Nobody wants to go back to it, but if you set a date, say a month after launch to follow up and share findings, let folks know ahead of time that changes may have to be made. We also talk about A/B testing in an upcoming post.
BTW — Landing pages and CTAs are hard
But don’t despair! A little thought and care when creating landing pages and CTAs will take a lot of the guesswork out of it. Remember; know what your goal is, design the page solely for the goal, focus the traffic on the goal, and leave them an out if they decide they don’t want to take you up on your primary offer. If they aren’t biting, go back to rework or take the time to create a better, more compelling CTA. Don’t be afraid to experiment. A colleague who played with conversion rates on his landing pages found that a certain color of green (which had nothing to do with the brand’s usual colors) converted at double the usual rate. Why? No idea why that particular green worked so well. Remember, people are weird (that includes you).
You never know what your audience will respond to. This is another reason to be willing to experiment with your CTAs and other elements on the page. Which will be the subject of another post; being open to experiments and how to do them.
Reach out to DemandWeb for help in consulting or setting up landing pages that convert for your business
Best of luck and bon marketing!
More on DemandWeb
LI Company Profile
Read more on marketing
Paul Warner (link leads to LI Profile) is heavily involved in digital marketing, advertising and analytics. Also loves to make music.
