Are You Spending Money on Sending Search and Social Traffic to Your Site?

Slow down on the spending and focus first on your landing pages.

As advertisers, we want to focus as much of our time and budget as possible on sending prospects to our website. But if the page you’re sending prospects to doesn’t convert them to warmer prospects or paying customers, it’s smarter to stop sending traffic and first focus on improving the landing page.

Stop, collaborate and listen to what your customer’s behavior is telling you.

Before using precious budget and resources on driving traffic to a page of your website, we like to look at the page’s analytics. Are people staying long enough to read the copy, look at the pictures and consider your offer? Do they visit other pages, too? If the analytics show users visiting the same page over and over again, consider adding that information to the landing page to save your visitor a step and provide the information wanted. Which question or box on your page’s form do they stop at before they abandon ship? These are just some of the page elements to get right before sending paid traffic to a page.

Here’s what we know about marketing campaign landing pages:

Whether your marketing is handled completely in house or you use an outsourced marketing partner, marketing is both an art and a science. Interpreting customer intent, crafting a message and correctly targeting an audience takes an artistic hand. Fortunately, much of landing page conversion optimization has become proven science:

  • Reducing the number of form fields from 4 to 3 can improve your conversion rate by 50%. That’s name, email, and one other thing of your choice. Every field you add drops your response rate.
  • Asking for a mandatory phone number increases your form abandonment rate. Make that field optional and abandonment decreases from 39% to 4%.
  • Make the button red. If that clashes with your brand colors, use orange or green.
  • Use a better word or phrase than “Submit” and you’ll increase form conversions by 3%.
  • Design for mobile first. That’s tricky, because we build websites and work with them on a desktop computer, but your site visitors are likely using a mobile device. Is your case compelling enough on mobile? Is the form easy to fill out, click, or make a purchase… from a mobile device?

Now, start pressing on the marketing gas pedal.

By optimizing your landing page before spending money on sending visitors to it, you can expect your conversion rates to improve and improve your ROI on digital advertising.

Once you’re seeing purchases and prospects making contact, you can start to scale your results by allocating more marketing budget to the channels, like LinkedIn, Google Ads, etc., that are converting at a higher rate.

Test theory against reality.

 Everything in the bullet points above is theory that may or may not have proven effective for between one and 100,000 websites. The point being your product, offer and audience are different. Using heat mapping and recording tools like Lucky Orange gives us a look at what customers are actually doing when they come to the site—what they click on, where they scroll and more.

If they act the way we want them to, great! If not, it can be tweaked and tested until they do. You may even be surprised by the way paid search traffic results in different behaviors than paid social traffic does. Maybe a different campaign landing page is the solution. The only way to know is to keep a close eye on it, like we do for our clients.

That’s what we know about landing pages. Want to have us apply that kind of thinking to your campaign? Let’s talk.