MindValley Labs Internet Marketing Blog

Land­ing pages are per­haps the most impor­tant part of your online mar­ket­ing strat­egy and now that Google is fac­tor­ing in the rel­e­vancy of your land­ing pages into the Qual­ity Score of your Google Ad Groups, cre­at­ing land­ing pages is more impor­tant than ever. It can make or break your online mar­ket­ing campaign.

Here’s How to Cre­ate Killer Land­ing Pages that Will Out­per­form your Com­peti­tors and Sig­nif­i­cantly Boost Your Revenue.

You’ve invested time and money to cre­ate a killer online mar­ket­ing cam­paign, com­plete with search engine place­ment, ban­ner ads, and pro­mo­tional emails. After test­ing and refin­ing your ads you’ve achieved a high CTR (click through rate), and you’re able to gen­er­ate traf­fic to your site.

Now comes the hard part: get­ting the traf­fic to convert.

How do you get vis­i­tors who click through to your site to stay and take action?

This is where land­ing pages come into play.

A land­ing page is the first page that vis­i­tors see after click­ing on your ban­ner ad, PPC ad, or pro­mo­tional email. A land­ing page is designed to direct vis­i­tors to take a spe­cific action, such as mak­ing a pur­chase, com­plet­ing a reg­is­tra­tion, or sub­scrib­ing to your mail­ing list.

Land­ing pages are per­haps the most impor­tant part of your adver­tis­ing strat­egy, yet less than 20% of your com­peti­tors actu­ally know how to use them well.

An effec­tive land­ing page is a cru­cial com­po­nent to help you con­vert browsers into buy­ers and to get your pay-per-click ads in Google to rank above your com­peti­tors. On aver­age, vis­i­tors spend less than 10 sec­onds look­ing at a land­ing page before deter­min­ing its use­ful­ness and rel­e­vance to their needs. Your land­ing page must entice vis­i­tors to stay and com­plete the desired action for con­ver­sion, whether it’s fill­ing out a sub­scrip­tion form or buy­ing a product.

What Makes a Good Land­ing Page?

Here is the most impor­tant tip to make your land­ing page effective.

Havev the head­line and copy cor­re­spond to the ad that trig­gered the page.

Hav­ing a rel­e­vant head­line and copy that directly relates to the con­tent and key­words of your ads is by far the sin­gle most impor­tant fac­tor to boost the ROI of your AdWords campaign.

Hav­ing a rel­e­vant head­line and copy gives the con­sumer the con­fi­dence that they have arrived at the page that will solve their ques­tion and prob­lem. This makes them far more likely to take action and to stay on your site. In test after test with Click­Muse, we have learned that just chang­ing the head­line alone to be tar­geted to the spe­cific Google AdGroup is often enough to boost the ROI by over 100%!

How­ever, don’t stop with just the head­line. Now that Google is index­ing every land­ing page, be sure to have the rest of your copy tar­geted for the spe­cific AdGroup and key­words. This will sig­nif­i­cantly increase the Qual­ity Score of your ads, lower the max­i­mum amount you have to bid and increase your impressions.

How can Click­Muse help?

For­tu­nately, Click­Muse was designed to allow mar­keters to cre­ate new land­ing pages on the fly. All you have to do is to spec­ify your Click­Muse pow­ered land­ing page and then to cre­ate cus­tomized ver­sions by going to the “Ad Opti­miza­tion” tab in ClickMuse.

Here is an exam­ple. Say that your main land­ing page is www.mindvalleylabs.com. Now, to cre­ate new landng pages via Click­Muse, just copy and paste your main land­ing page and call it:

http://www.mindvalley.com/main_cm.php

In the set­tings in Click­Muse you would now enter the new URL of the “Click­Muse pow­ered land­ing page” (i.e. http://www.mindvalley.com/main_cm.php). Of course this page could be at any given URL. The above is just an example.

Next, you have to decide what parts of your “Click­Muse pow­ered land­ing page” you actu­ally want to be served by Click­Muse. Come again? Ok, this is actu­ally quite sim­ple. With Click­Muse, you have the option of decid­ing what parts of your page you want to test and cus­tomize. For exam­ple, if you only want to test new head­lines, then you insert the Click­Muse code exactly where your head­line used to be on your land­ing page.

How­ever, Click­Muse is far more pow­er­ful. Instead of doing the above this is what we rec­om­mend: On your “Click.Muse pow­ered land­ing page” have noth­ing except for the Click­Muse code snip­pet. In other words, the page would only con­tain the include state­ment from ClickMuse.

That means that the ENTIRE land­ing page is now pow­ered and served by Click­Muse. The advan­tage of this is that you can decide to test and change any ele­ment of your land­ing page! So, instead of just being able to type in a new head­line, you can tweak and test any ele­ment that you like such as the sign-up form, the header, etc.

Note for advanced users only: If you are using SSI (server side includes) on your site, you can add these include state­ments directly into your tests in Click­Muse. That way, you can update mul­ti­ple tests at the same time if they are all call­ing the same include statement!

Once you have setup your “Click­Muse pow­ered land­ing page” cre­at­ing new land­ing pages for each of your online mar­ket­ing cam­paigns takes only a few min­utes. You sim­ply click on “Add new Ad Group” and Click­Muse will auto­mat­i­cally cre­ate a new land­ing page for that Ad Group. Each new land­ing page has a unique URL so that you can point all the traf­fic from each of your Ad Groups in Google for exam­ple to the respec­tive land­ing pages you have just setup. Below is an illus­tra­tion that might help.

The power of key­word tar­geted land­ing pages:

When we first started adver­tis­ing on Google AdWords we directed traf­fic from around 2,000 key­words to our site’s home­page. Our signup rate remained steady at around 7%.

Later, we decided to seg­ment our PPC adver­tis­ing into 8 dif­fer­ent cat­e­gories and lead every click to a page with a cus­tomized head­line. These were not new land­ing pages — but rather copies of the home­page with one dif­fer­ence: the head­line was adjusted to cor­re­spond to the ad. For exam­ple, clicks from ads related to “med­i­ta­tion” would see a head­line con­tain­ing the word “med­i­ta­tion.” Those clicks from ads on “stress con­trol” would see a head­line con­tain­ing the words “stress con­trol” and so on.

With no other changes to our site, sim­ply adjust­ing the head­line to the cam­paign caused a 50% boost in signups. Our signup rate was now hov­er­ing around 11%.

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About the Author

Prior to MindValley Media, Mike was the Head of New Ventures Strategy at eBay where he conceived of the strategies that led to the investment in Craigslist, the launch of Kijiji.com and the acquisition of Skype. Mike has an MBA from Stanford and previously worked for the Boston Consulting Group. He is also a certified Google AdWords Professional.

Check out other posts by Mike Reining

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