By John Eberhard
The elements of a successful landing page change regularly.
First of all let’s define what a landing page is. A landing page is a page created specifically for people to land on when they click on an ad in Google Ads, Facebook, or when they click a link in an email.
A landing page needs to be exactly on the topic of the ad. If your ad is about a specific product or service, then the landing page needs to be about exactly that. You don’t make them search around to find what the ad was about. So a landing page is much different from a home page of your website, and you should never land people on your home page from an ad or email.
I discovered 25 years ago that you do not want a landing page to have navigation buttons on it. You do not want people wandering around your site when they click on your ad. I found out that people always converted (filled out a form or called a number to contact you) at a higher percentage of the time when there were no navigation buttons on the landing page.
The landing page needs to have a response form for people to contact you. It also needs to have a phone number. But the phone number needs to be a trackable phone number, so you know how many people called the number on that landing page. I use a service called Callrail, where they give you a phone number that, when someone calls, it bounces over to your main number. But the call is tracked.
That way I know how many people filled out the response form and also how many called the number from that landing page. That gives you an accurate statistic on how many people responded to that landing page.
About 6 months ago I started doing some research on what successful landing pages look like. I found this guy who made videos talking about this. He said basically, the landing page needs to have:
- A big headline that speaks to the person’s buttons. This means either the person’s pain points, i.e. what negative thing he’s experiencing that you can solve with your product or service. Or the headline speaks to the positive benefits he’ll get from your product.
- Some sales text underneath the headline.
- A response form.
- An arrow pointing to the response form (yes really).
- A large graphic image or video.
Now all of that has to appear above the fold, which in web design speak means what you see on the screen before scrolling down the page.
You can have other content below the fold, such as testimonials, more text, videos, etc.
So this sounded good to me, but I didn’t know if it would really work better. So I tried it out with several of my Google Ads clients. And this format got better conversions (the person responding by the response form or phone) in every case. One client has had highest ever conversions for two months in a row.
If you’d like help creating landing pages for your promotion, contact Real Web Marketing at 661-441-2429 or fill out a form here.
