Are you ready to give up on Paid Advertising because all you see is cost and little or no conversions?
If you are then you’re no different to a large number of people we talk to on a regular basis, and, whilst there can be many reasons for the lack of results, one of the most overlooked by businesses and agencies alike is the website or landing page.
When an Ad campaign isn’t performing well the first place people look is the network, adjust Ad copy, change bidding, remove targeting or stop the campaign altogether but in over 70% of cases nobody bothered to look at the website. After all, Meta, Google, Microsoft, TikTok and others continue to grow in revenue from advertisers so it can’t be all bad.
What’s the real problem?
Again, you can never rule out the Ad campaign itself, but let’s assume for a minute that your campaign is good enough to drive targeted traffic to your landing page.
A landing page should be viewed as a part of the overall sales funnel, to work in tandem with your adverts, and if that part of the funnel has a hole then you could be leaking hundreds of potential new customers. If you are, then Ads can get really expensive, really quickly and force you into shutting down what could be your best performing sales channel. Are you prepared to take that risk?
Why user experience is so important
With an estimated 500 million English speaking websites, the internet has never been busier. Unlike the days when you pulled out the Yellow pages, just about all of these websites are available to users from the comfort of their own home.
This huge availability has shifted what’s important to a user when picking a store or supplier. Just think about it, unless you’re looking for a specific website, how many times have you clicked the back button because it took more than a couple of seconds to load the site content? How often have you found a great deal in a Google Ad but got frustrated trying to access the website and, instead, headed straight to Amazon?
On the flip side, how many times have you contacted a company or made a purchase because the landing page loaded quickly, you found exactly what you were looking for, there were reviews from happy customers and, if you needed more information about the product or service, it was all there with high quality images and you didn’t need to go clicking around?
How to turn your Ads into sales
Conversion Rate Optimisation is actually a huge, data-driven and sometimes technical subject, but there are lots of simple changes you could be making that have a big impact on your conversion rates and help to stop that leaking bucket.
1. Make sure your ads and landing page work together
Your advert copy and any promises or claims made should be mirrored on your landing pages. You’ll also want to make sure, if you’re using a dedicated landing page platform that your branding and messaging is consistent with your main website.
The visitor should know immediately that they’re in the right place so don’t be afraid to have lots of landing pages if that’s what you need in order to make a strong connection with the visitor.
2. Track absolutely everything
At a bare minimum you should be tracking conversions, although you might be surprised how many businesses and even agencies don’t. Ultimately, the more you track, the more information you gather, the better the data you have to improve your landing page, your conversion rate and overall return.
One of the biggest missed opportunities, certainly for offline or service-based businesses, is phone calls. If you ask someone in a busy office how many good sales calls they had, they’ll always underestimate. Estimations are not good enough when making decisions that could dramatically affect your business.
3. Identify with the visitor’s problem, desire and solution
Most of the time a visitor to your landing page will be looking to solve a problem, whether that’s purchasing a product they’re trying to find or maybe they have a water pipe that’s leaking, regardless of their problem the first thing your landing page should do is to identify it. Not only will the visitor know they’re in the right place but it’ll create the perfect link between your Ad copy and your content.
The next step is to understand their desire, make sure your landing page is connected with what they’re looking to achieve. For ecommerce, this could simply be an engaging product description but for service based businesses you could expand more into the outcome a particular offering will create.
Finally is the solution, but it’s not as simple as just saying you’re amazing so they should choose you – you need to give examples. For ecommerce that could be talking about the quality of your product, how long it lasts, why it’s better for them than the competition and for service based businesses you might talk about why people stay with you, the results you achieve and what makes you different.
4. Make it easy to convert
A really common mistake is to make the conversion process too complicated – you need to make it as simple as possible to click and convert, for every second they have to work it out, you’ll begin losing a large percentage of your audience.
For ecommerce businesses don’t try to reinvent the wheel. If you take a look at Amazon or almost any large shopping website, you’ll notice an obvious “buy” button, usually to the right of a product image. It’s there for a reason.
For service based businesses, a good rule of thumb is to have three call to action options, one within view when you hit the page, right below your “problem” section, another right after the “desire” section and finally at the bottom of the page after your “solution”. You’ll never know at what point of the process the visitor is ready to convert so make sure you have a button there, ready to be clicked, at all times.
5. Use social proof
Any business owner will tell you that the best leads and sales come from recommendations and referrals and whilst that doesn’t directly relate to anything you can do on your landing page, the next best thing is social proof.
If you have happy customers then ask them for a paragraph on why they love your product or service and make sure it’s displayed, at the very least, towards the end of your content to reinforce everything you’ve said. You’ll be amazed how much potential new customers will take into account what other people say about their experience with your business.
Enjoy the results
Conversion Rate Optimisation is an ongoing process, you’ll never create the best converting landing page from day one and so you should continue to revise your content once you have the data to do so, but, If you get your landing page right, or at least heading in the right direction then you can start to enjoy increased conversion rates.
Not only should the above tips give you a better Return on Advertising Spend (ROAS) but if your landing page is navigable from the main website, you should also see an increase in organic traffic conversions – more enquiries and sales for no extra visitors and zero extra spend!
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