More Than Just Clicks
When you’re running AdWords campaigns it’s easy to get caught up in clicks and click through rate, forgetting that getting good statistics on your AdWords dashboard isn’t the end goal. The reason you’re running PPC ads is to find more customers and to do so these clicks need to be turning into conversions.
Once the user clicks on your ad they’re taken to your landing page. This is where the second half of running a PPC campaign starts. After the click, you still have to convince a lead to convert. That could be filling in a form, making a purchase, or just watching a video.
So how do you make an AdWords landing page that’s going to get you conversions?
Where to start?
Firstly, build landing pages. The number of AdWords accounts we see that send visitors to a homepage, or a simple contact us page, is astounding. Especially as many of the homepage that the user goes to have no CTA on them.
Unless you are running a simple brand awareness campaign, there should be no reason (apart from laziness) to be sending people who click on your ads to your homepage. At the very least you should create one landing page that includes the keywords from your ads and your keywords themselves. This landing page should have one clear call to action and a form for you to take your customer’s information.
Taking things a step forward, you should then create a second landing page with variations of the information you put on the first. Then you will be able to A/B test the two landing pages and can start making improvements to the one that is underperforming.
What are my options?
You can test everything on a landing page so it’s sometimes daunting, but here’s a brief list of things that we would often test:
- Images (big, small, none)
- Lots of text vs minimal text
- Form location (sidebar/ above the fold/ below the fold etc)
- Number of fields in the form
- Button size
- Button color
- Background color
Deciding what to change, or how to change it, is no exact science. The most important thing to do is to make sure you’re recording what changes you have made and when. This will enable you to see when improvements happen.
The sheer scale of possible changes is often what puts people off. Especially as it isn’t as clear as in a platform like AdWords which of your changes has made a difference. To combat that you can use services like Crazy Egg or HotJar. These companies allow you to see where users go on your landing pages, highlighting where they click, where their cursor goes and other useful information. This can give you the edge when it comes to making changes to your landing pages.
Make A Simple AdWords Landing Page
But the most important advice is to keep things simple. Make a change, note when you did it, then check back after a month. Then repeat the process until the end of time!
Photo credit – Bottom: Pixabay
