Though we previously discussed landing pages in 5 Pitfalls To Avoid In Your PPC Landing Page, this infographic from Unbounce emphasizes a few common sense rules that bear repeating. If you’re advertising software on a search engine or website, it’s time to increase your conversion rate and lower your CPC.
Any business worth its salt advertises on a PPC model. A search engine or website displays an advertisement and the advertiser (a software company in our case) pays the SE or website when a visitor clicks through to the landing page. The purpose of a landing page, of course, is to convert the visitor and a conversion is defined however the advertiser wishes. Sometimes it is payment for a product or service. Other times it is acquiring an email address.
The infographic’s most important idea is that of relevancy. Making the message of your landing page consistent with the message of your ad improves quality score, ad rank, and conversion rate. Homepages that are used as landing pages, almost by definition, cannot have as relevant a message as a landing page whose design is specifically based on an ad’s message. The message on a homepage is too broad, too diverse to be linked to an ad. Begin by targeting keywords to synthesize the content of an ad and a landing page. This synthesis is a key tactic for raising quality scores.
Interestingly, Unbounce also suggests that using a shopping cart or a registration page as a landing page does not provide ad networks enough information to obtain a high quality score. They also mention that these types of landing pages are too hard of a sell for visitors. Instead, focus on a message that persuades the visitor to click through to the cart or registration.
Just as there is not single type of visitor, there is no single best practice for landing pages. They should be intelligently designed, a result of experiments and experience. However, knowing the difference between the right and wrong way of doing something also depends on learning from other people’s experiences.
