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Best Practices: Optimize the Website Landing Pages
To improve user experience and improve conversion rates, it's important to optimize the landing pages for your ads by creating different layouts and messaging, and then testing their performance. Landing page testing should be a continuous initiative for any advertiser.
Note: Adobe provides landing page testing services at no cost for advertisers with full-service contracts.
Design Effective Landing Pages
The following are some guidelines for designing landing pages that will provide a positive user experience.
Keep the message consistent with the ad copy. For search ads, the page title tag and the ad's main headline ideally should contain the keyword phrase used in the user's search query.
A landing page should have only one goal, so include only one actionable item (such as a "Buy Now" or "Sign Up" button, or other element that the user has to interact with to initiate a conversion). For example, if the goal is to collect visitor information for a lead aggregator, don’t include a newsletter sign-up on the landing page. Similarly, if the goal is to sign up the visitor for a free trial, don’t provide a button for the free trial and another button for the full subscription; convert your free trial sign-ups at another time.
Place the actionable element on the page “above the fold” so the user can see it without having to scroll down the page.
Use good page design; a good design can immediately engender trust, a sense of familiarity, and credibility. Customize your form buttons to make them more noticeable; don’t just use the standard browser-generated button with the word “Submit” on it. Use a two-column layout, with the actionable item in the main column and supporting information in the second column.
Provide credibility and security indicators. Logos and seals help reduce visitor anxiety. These include Verisign, BBB logo, eTrust, HackerSafe, satisfaction guarantees, money back offers, and so on. Include a privacy statement whenever information is being collected. Place these indicators as close to the actionable item as possible.
Offer an incentive, such as free shipping, a free gift, a product discount, or a free white paper or ebook. A visitor hitting a landing page is shopping around and needs an incentive to stay on a page and complete the offer. The incentive should be one of the most notable items on the page.
When the goal is to collect information from the visitor using forms, use only the form fields that are absolutely necessary. The fewer the number of fields, the more likely the user is to fill them out and submit the form.
If the conversion process has multiple phases (more than one step or page visit), keep the phases to a minimum.
The more anxiety users have about buying a product (for example, because it has a high price or is complex) the more effective long copy will be, so provide more information. For products that cause little anxiety, or offers for free subscriptions or free services, short copy is more effective.
Include keyword-rich content on the page. Make headlines text, not images, and use proper title, meta description and meta keyword tags. This will help improve a page’s quality score and allow you to get higher ad positions within the sponsored lists on a search engine results page and a lower cost per click.
Be careful when using testimonials. Any testimonial should feel real; a testimonial that sounds generic or fake and is accompanied by an obvious stock portrait will harm the page more than help it. A proven approach is to include a message, image, and signature from someone high up in the company (such as the company’s president, head of product development, or director of consumer research) offering the product or service.
For search campaigns and Facebook ad sets, validate the landing pages in your destination URLs using campaign bulksheets.
Test the Impact of Landing Pages
To see the impact of changing the landing page (when everything else is constant), run the Ad Variation Report, which includes the display URL and the destination URL for each ad.
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