Adwords Explained - Page 11 - Landing Page Design

How to avoid a crash landing

Once a user arrives at your website on your “landing page”, you need to ensure that you take advantage of this situation and maximise the chances that the user continues the relationship with your organisation.

Research into online advertising has shown that a large number of users do not travel further than the first page they arrive at on an advertiser’s website. If they don’t like what they find, they leave immediately. Setting up a well structured landing page therefore can be critical to improving your overall return on investment or ad spend.

Too much detail vs too little

A customer with a strong interest in purchasing a particular product or service will be willing to read a little about the key characteristics of this product or service. It’s a fine balance however. As can be seen in the following screen shot (of a good landing page), this company offers professional graphic design with supporting information about their product, key highlighted features with bullet points and a contact form. They are requesting a call to action and supporting it with key information. Perhaps the only improvement could be some time of special offer supporting their call to action.

You can definitely kill a customer’s interest with pages and pages of drivel or useless high level “marketing speak” that doesn’t deliver valuable information about the product or service, but don’t be afraid to describe key pieces of information that add value to a customer’s purchase decision, even if that takes a few pages.

Consider what you want the user to do (submit an inquiry through a Contact form, or place an order through your shopping cart) and what sort of information the user will require in order to be able to make this decision effectively. You should aim to present just the relevant information for the user to support their decision to take this action and no more. If that takes a page and a half, don’t be afraid to include this amount of detail – but don’t waffle on for pages just for effect. Certainly 3 or 4 brief bullet points will not be enough information to support an anxious customer who has had no prior relationship with your firm, and is seeking some re-assurance about the quality of your service.

Avoid confusing your message

When presenting this information to the user, avoid cluttering your page with a range of information about your other products or services. Remember you’re your site visitor clicked on a particular advertisement which they were interested in, and don’t succumb to temptation to push a range of other products onto them while they are there.

In the screenshot above the customer is presented with information about horoscopes, airfares and coffee grinders all on the one page (from a coffee supplier). This runs the very high risk of confusing users!

Consider a secondary goal for your page

If your user isn’t willing to take the primary action that you intend for them (a purchase or inquiry) then having some other supporting information for them to take away is worthwhile (ie a secondary goal on the page), however it’s best not to confuse the user with 3 or 4 or 5 different product or service offerings.

A curious user will use your main website navigation mechanism to seek out other information about your company if they are curious.

A “Contact Us” page is not enough

A user who arrives at your website by clicking on a Google advertisement will usually have reacted to some tantalising promise of added value or products and services that your Adwords advertisement alluded to. Simply sending them to a contact form on your website is certainly not going to satiate that curiousity about what you do. You are highly likely to lose your prospective client and not achieve a web inquiry if you tell them nothing more about your products and services and simply send them to a contact form.

Remove the obvious barriers to conversion

Aside from problems of information overload or underload, the user is certainly not going to respond well to things like links on your website that cause errors, or forms that require the user to fill out 15 different information fields, or pop up messages asking you to install various flash plugins or other barriers to completing the conversion action.

Use good advertising copy-writing principles

As with the authoring of your Adwords ads, the wording you use on your landing page should conform with best principles in writing good Advertising copy. Ensure that any graphical images you utilise support the key message you are trying to deliver. Ensure you include enough information to support the key decision that you intend for the user. Don’t be afraid to describe the key charactistics of your product or service. Use simple language, and if appropriate, a little flare or flamboyance in your message.

Telling a story or an anecdote about someone making a similar difficult purchase decision, and don’t hesitate to refer to prior direct experience that your company has had that is relevant to the user’s purchase.

Worth remembering is that your user responded to certain keyword search prompts in responding to their Google Adwords advertisement. Ensuring that your landing page contains plenty of references to similar keywords and concepts is also worth keeping in mind.

Home pages aren’t always the best option

Your website home page, as the main page on your internet site is often the default choice to send users to in response to your Google advertisements. Before selecting this default choice however, consider whether your home page has taken into account the above issues in the information that is presented there. If not, or if it’s simply a “corporate page” with generic information about your company then don’t rush to send them to your home page just because it looks nice.

Wherever you send your user, it should focus on achieving the key conversion goal, and a generic home page providing an overview of your products and services is not always the right destination. Sometimes it is however, so if you feel your homepage does achieve these objectives, then by all means use this as your landing page.

Separate Ad groups can be setup to direct users to different landing page url’s on an advertiser website and the performance of each Ad Group separately measured, allowing exact monitoring of the performance of each landing page in terms of its effectiveness in converting traffic to an inquiry or sale.

Establish your credibility

In establishing your credibility online various supporting information helps re-assure users facing the difficult choice of whether to entrust an unknown supplier with their money. Consider some of the following important issues when dealing with your new prospective customers:

Including your physical address is a basic starting point including your contact phone number, and the names of the people they are likely to deal with – providing these on the page they arrive on offers the most basic re-assurance. Ensure you include relevant articles and citations and references to support the purchase decision, and include any credentials or your team, or of the people used as reference points. Including FAQ’s to common client questions at the point of purchase is also worthwhile.

References to sites that major or well known business partners are worth listing as partners visibly.

Ensure that your landing page uses a professional graphic design and does not look “cheap and nasty”. This first impression of the quality of the graphic design is a very important aspect of your landing page.

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