6 Essential PPC Landing Page Optimizations

Your landing pages aren’t converting. Think! why this happen? Sadly, this is not your customer’s fault. It’s your job to tell your customers why your product is awesome and you have fewer than five seconds to tell that story.

Regardless of whether you’re a rookie or experienced marketer, we’ve assembled the following checklist to help you avoid some of the common pitfalls we see all too often with pay-per-click landing pages. The hope being that you can take some of the recommendations into consideration before you go with live AdWords campaigns of your own.

1) Pre-Populate Cursor – Does your landing page have a form field you want customers to fill out? If it does, a great way to reduce friction, and increase conversion rate, is to pre-populate the cursor into the first field. This might sound like a nit, but in all the tests I’ve seen run, this seemingly slight difference has had a significant impact on conversion rates. A great example of this in the wild is what eHouseOffers does with their sign up page.

2) Eye Contact –You probably turn your head and look at what everyone else is looking at. This seemingly obvious piece of human behavior is something you shouldn’t forget to talk to your designer about on your landing pages.

What do I mean? Well, the concept is simple. Think of it as the “Look at what other people are looking at” principle, but essentially what it means is that people will tend to look where the subjects in your hero graphic look, not necessarily at your ad creative.

3) Testimonials – Another technique that is incredibly effective is including customer testimonials on your landing page. There’s really no better way to build trust with prospective customers than to have existing customers sing your praises and include the testimonial in the header of your site, you should include testimonials somewhere on your landing page – possibly in the sidebar.

4) Point of Action Assurances – It’d be impossible to create a landing page checklist without referencing Bryan Eisenberg, who was truly one of the first real conversion rate gurus. One of the best tips Eisenberg gives in his book Always be Testing is around the importance of putting trust icons, or “point of action assurances” as he calls them, next to your call-to-action buttons. Put another way, if you put trust icons next to your submit buttons more people will click on them. One of many examples of this principle in action is what Proven Therapy does on their sleep apnea treatment landing pages.

5) Match Headline with Intent – Not to be forgotten when considering landing page optimization is Google AdWords quality score. Having a high quality score will not only decrease your cost-per-click, it will also help reduce overall acquisition costs

Drive a Single Call-to-Action – One of the most common mistakes we see is people trying to do too much with their landing pages. If you ask visitors to do 55 things, odds are they’ll bounce instantaneously. However, if you focus on driving a single action, you’re likely to get people to take the action you want.

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