You customers need a place to land, and your home page just doesn’t cut it anymore. Try a custom landing page to get more leads to close?
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For years now, businesses have thrived on Google Adwords campaigns designed as the principle source for online leads. And there’s a good reason for that: for many businesses it simply works.
Of course, for some industries and keywords the barrier to entry into the Google Adword space is exorbitant costs for premium keywords. For areas like personal injury law or dentistry paying $18/ click for a given keyword might be pricey for some business owners.
But for many, the cost-per-click and the average cost of customer acquisition (when offset by an attractive average revenue per new customer transaction) are optimal for driving new sales and business growth.
One way businesses are bringing down that cost of acquisition and optimizing their Google Adwords campaigns is adding custom landing pages on their websites that speak directly to customers who click their ad links. Here are four reasons you may want to ditch the home page as the your ad URL and consider a custom landing page the next time you turn to Google Adwords for new sales.
1) Clarity and User Experience: A business’ home page or services page may sound like a good choice for an online ad’s landing page but consider this, when you’re in a supermarket and ask for the location of Tabasco sauce and a clerk tells you, “aisle three,” if you get to aisle three, and there are so many products you need a map locating the Tabasco sauce even still, you will likely be frustrated.
With online attention spans almost at lightening speed these days, the generic nature of your standard home or services page will leave your leads just as frazzled. A landing page offers a place to tailor your message to one congruent with your online ad. Offer all the specifics a customer needs to make a decision, and you’ll keep them on the page longer and entice them to buy a lot easier than providing a series of clicks and drop down menus by which to haplessly hunt for all the details of your business offering.
2) Call to Action: A prominent call to action is almost as important with online ad campaigns as providing a great value proposition. Creating a giant signup or contact form for the Home Page just dilutes the branding and messaging meant for that resource. It also seems a little desperate.
For a landing page, not so. A landing page is a one-stop shop for all the information a visitor needs to take the next steps to contact you, and a contact form is a must for that!
3) Custom Language for Ad Congruency: Most pay-per-click platforms assign a higher cost-per -click for ads whose linked webpages didn’t exactly match the language of the ad itself. This was implemented in the early days of digital advertising to thwart bait and switch advertisers who promised one thing in the ad and another on their website.
A landing page allows you to customize the language of your linked page so that it more closely aligns with your ad. Typically, a home page is broad in scope, so being specific in an Adwords campaign wouldn’t prove such a fit and ultimately would cause the cost of your campaign to skyrocket. With a custom landing page, there’s the ability to make sure your ad language is synchronous, your audience gets what they expected and the cost to bring them to your website is not enormous.
4) Ad Performance Tracking: With a custom landing page, you have the unique opportunity to track your ad campaign’s performance independent of the ad platform and its metrics. So long as you page is not linked via the site menu or any other page on your site (in other words, hidden), with a Google Analytics account, you can track when visitors hit the page, track what kind of traffic you’re getting and ensure that you are able to track the performance of your advertisement.
5) Landing Pages Aren’t Just for Google Adwords Anymore: With digital advertising all the rage these days, social media advertising campaigns can benefit from custom landing pages just as easily as Google Adwords. Simply create a campaign in Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or LinkedIn (or any other social platform, for that matter) and tailor a custom landing page (perhaps even the same one as your Google Adwords landing page) to it and you’re off!
If you’d like to learn more about the ways a custom landing page can help improve the performance of your digital advertising, call the online visibility consultants at Proctor Digital (773.245.7226). We love helping small business owners get a leg up on the competition.