5 Bare Essentials of an Optimized PPC Landing Page

Getting clicks is only half the battle in a successful PPC campaign. If your offer’s landing page isn’t optimized, you’re missing out on potential conversions. You’re paying for each click, so you definitely want to maximize your opportunity for ROI with a compelling (and functioning) landing page.

The good news is, you don’t have to spend a whole lot of time optimizing your landing page. As long as you have the following bases covered, you’re a step ahead of the game.

1) Eliminate the clutter.

The path to conversion should be clear of obstacles and distractions. Keep the important content above the fold, and limit your CTA to one. Asking a visitor to perform more than one action can be confusing, yet 48% of landing pages contain multiple offers (Source). You don’t want to be part of that 48%. Ask your visitors to do one thing and one thing only.

2) Be relevant and consistent.

When a visitor clicks your ad, they expect to be taken to a page related to the keyword or creative that brought them there. If a visitor searches for “women’s shoes,” for example, directing her to an online apparel store’s homepage is likely to result in a bounce because, instead of finding women’s shoes, the visitor needs to hunt for the product she’s looking for.

More often than not, a targeted landing page converts better than a generic homepage. If you have a landing page that’s relevant to a variety of keywords in your campaign, you can use dynamic keyword insertion (DKI) to make your landing page copy more relevant. With DKI, you can dynamically populate all sorts of relevant copy on your landing page, like the visitor’s location or the name of the referring traffic source.

Let’s say a user in Florida performs a search for “bikinis”. Your landing page could dynamically populate a relevant headline like, “Shop for the hottest bikinis in Florida!”, which is much more specific to the visitor’s needs than “Shop for the hottest swimwear!” That being said, you’ll need to make sure the rest of the information on the page is consistent with whatever text you generate dynamically. If you’re promising bikinis being sold in Florida, don’t have a page full of men’s Speedos being sold in Alaska.

3) Cut down your page load time.

The longer a visitor has to wait for a page to load, the more likely they are to leave your page. And once that visitor is gone, they’re probably not coming back, so you can kiss that conversion goodbye. A one-second delay in your site speed can result in a 7% reduction in conversions (Source). That’s a huge hit to your bottom line. Avoid missing out on conversions by eliminating any unnecessary content that slows down the page, like large flash files and multiple redirects.

4) Triple check landing page copy for spelling and grammar mistakes.

This seems obvious, but mistakes can easily be overlooked. Spell check alone won’t always find every slip-up, so run your landing page past a second set of eyes if you can. If you have images with text, don’t forget to check those for errors, too. One misspelling or incorrect sentence can make your offer look unprofessional or, worse, untrustworthy.

5) Track, test, and tweak your landing page. Then do it again.

Optimization isn’t a one-and-done task. To keep conversions on the upswing, you’ll need to make strategic improvements. To do so, you’ll need to track the KPIs that directly relate to conversion (as well as tracking conversion, obviously!). Tracking is done several ways depending on your tracking platform, but typically you’ll need to structure a modified version of your URL that passes KPIs back to your tracking platform, in addition to installing a transparent pixel that fires information back to your tracking platform when a conversion happens. Once that’s all set up, you’re in a position to measure performance.

The data you collect will provide some insight to how visitors are finding and interacting with your landing page, but you’ll need to perform A/B tests to figure out what changes affect conversion.

With A/B testing, you can make small changes to your landing page and test differences in performance. After a significant amount of time, you’ll collect enough data to determine which content more effectively drives conversion, so you know what changes to make permanent.

50onRed has dedicated staff on hand to deliver personalized landing page optimization tips, and that’s one way we stand out from our competitors. If you’re looking for a traffic platform for your next PPC or PPV campaign, drop us a line to find out if 50onRed is right for you.

What tips do you have for landing page optimization? Have you ever encountered a landing page that was an absolute conversion killer? Share your thoughts in the comments!