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%.

Recent posts by Mike

• AdWords Help - New FAQ
• New AdWords Book
• Google AdWords Content Targeting Just Got More Powerful
• How many keywords per Ad Group?
• Introducing Our Newest Blogger: Amir Ahmad

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

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