Whether you’re building out a new set of landing pages or revamping existing ones for your ecommerce PPC campaign, optimizing your landing pages can help promote better conversion rates. The art of landing page optimization depends on a number of variables. Two of the most contingent variables are what it is you’re offering (e.g. expensive product vs. cheap product) and what are the motives of your target market (e.g. buying now, shopping around, etc.)?
Having a good understanding of your target market and how to best cater to their needs will help you construct superb landing pages that promote the achievement of your site’s conversion goals. The idea behind landing page optimization is help direct the attention of your website visitors. And although your site’s conversion goals will be unique, there are several common strategies that you can employ for better landing page performance.
Keep Your Landing Pages Highly Focused
This tip might be obvious for experienced PPC advertisers, but it’s essential to keep your landing pages extremely focal. If you’re bidding on product-level keywords, you should be taking these visitors to the corresponding product page for the given keyword. This helps to minimize the conversion funnel and aid immediate action.
If you’re offering more expensive goods, your landing pages should offer more information, especially with respect to product details, price, and shipping. Advertising expensive products might also inspire the need to add extra steps in your conversion funnel to instill greater credibility and trust in your consumers.
For most ecommerce PPC campaigns, you’ll want to have dedicated landing pages per ad group. If you’re directing visitors to your homepage, this is sign that you may want to develop new landing pages to match the focus of the ad group. The expectations of search engine users are growing, so you must cater to those expectations to earn greater respect and sales.
Simplify Your Landing Pages
Parallel to keeping your PPC landing pages focused, you’ll also want to keep them simple. This should focus on minimizing the options a visitor has in order to promote desirable action that meets your conversion goals. For instance, by stripping the site-wide navigation of select landing pages, you can eliminate options that may distract the attention of visitors.
Although it’s important to maintain consistency in the design of your landing pages, you can still simplify the structure and layout. This helps to cut-down on clutter while making your landing pages more attractive to the eye. Assess the elements of you side-bar navigation links or any graphics that you’re using. Are these elements helping or distracting your potential customers?
Captivate Customers with Exceptional Content
There are many forms of content that you can exploit to enhance the power of your landing pages. The page copy plays a pivotal role in communicating to your visitors. The copy needs empathy-driven in that it focuses on the motives of the target market. Test different variations of headlines and supportive text to determine what works best. In addition to conversion rate, bounce rate and time on page are good indicators of how effective your copy is.
Videos are also an engaging form of content that can increase the conversion potential of your landing pages. In most cases for ecommerce PPC advertising, you’ll want to keep your videos short and to-the-point. Product profile videos and reviews are great topics for landing page videos.
Test Various Landing Pages Concepts
Testing is integral for almost any form of PPC optimization. Landing pages in particular must be tested for ongoing optimization and refinement. Google now offers a number of great tools in Analytics that can help you gauge the effectiveness of a webpage and how users interact with certain elements on the page.
It’s important to be very organized with your landing page testing. Keep a detailed record of what changes you make per page and note any corresponding metrics that reflect certain alterations. Testing can help you pinpoint strengths and weaknesses in your landing pages, helping to ensure you’re constantly improving your optimization efforts.