Landing Page Developement & Testing

When in the landing page development phase it is important that you follow some simple guidelines in order to receive the best results possible.

Lets take a look at what we have identified to work best for a high converting landing page.

1 – First Impression:

Make sure your landing page clearly communicates what your product or service is.  If it is unclear as to what the page is about the common browser will usually click the back button to find what they are looking for.

2 – Above the fold:

Keep all of your important information visible above the fold of you landing page.  You want all of your text, bullet points, images, and most importantly your call to action to be visible without having to scroll.

3 – Simplify Things:

Instead of long paragraphs, make bullet points with your strongest selling points short enough for the visitor to scan and make a quick decision.  The longer you keep a visitors attention the more likely they will convert.

4 – Establish Trust:

Being a reputable company goes a long way these days.  BBB Logo, As seen on the News or TV, a secure check out, and guarantees all help to establish trust.  Make sure to only use these if they actually apply to your business, otherwise your defeating the whole purpose of establishing trust.

5 – Strong Call to Action:

The whole point of landing page is to have your visitor complete a desired action.  Whether it be a Order Button or Request more Info button make sure your Call to Action is easily visible and lets your visitor know what to do next.

6 – Testing:

Above all else the single most important part of landing page development is testing.  Your job is never done when testing landing pages.  Just when you think you have found the winning formula you can always change something as little as an image or the bullet point and find a higher converting landing page.

Landing pages are extremely important for any business, especially when you are doing Pay Per Click Advertising.  Remember that these are simply what we have found to perform the best, but I highly recommend you do some landing page testing and prove me wrong.  You never know, just because a certain formula works for one landing page, doesn’t it mean is best for yours.

If you are not leveraging Google’s Ad Extensions in AdWord’s, you should take a look at why you should.

What are Ad Extensions?

“Ad extensions expand a standard text ad with one or more lines that provide additional information such as an address and phone number (location extensions and call extensions), more page links (ad sitelinks), and product images (product extensions). Sitelinks allow advertisers to include additional page links on qualifying text ads that appear on Google.com and Google Search Network partners. This extension is available globally on ads that meet our quality requirements. The most common campaigns to qualify for the Sitelinks feature are high-quality campaigns that contain keywords and ads specific to your brands.” – Google,  https://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=141826

To access Ad Extension go to your drop-down arrow at the far end of your Adwords tabs  (which include Campaign, Adgroups, Keywords, Ads, Networks, etc..) and select Ad Extension from the 2nd check-box.

With this new tab you now have access to Phone Extensions & Site-link Extensions as well as being able to link your AdWord’s account to to your Google places (Location Extensions), Google Merchant Center/Products (Product Extensions)

For the sake of this post, we will only be focusing on Sitelinks.

Select a campaign and add a new sitelink.  You are allowed 1-10 additional links which may appear below your ad.

For Example:

(Names have been replaced with XYZ for privacy reasons)

Notice how this ad “pops” with the additional line of text and also encourages the searcher to refine their results through your ad & show direct-link related offerings.

Does it work?  You be the judge:

(May 2011)

Those are some fantastic CTR results with very little effort to create – You can even add them in the Google AdWords Editor.

Other sitelink ideas:

• Services > Specials > Contact Us
• Men’s > Women’s > Children’s
• Brands > Part# Search > RFQ
• Debt Calculator > Programs >Testimonials