6 Landing Page Mistakes You Don’t Want to Make

What was discussed?

Quote of the day: “You learn the value of hard work by working hard.”

With Google Adwords, you want to send someone to a landing page rather than your homepage. The landing page is a page you’ve created specifically for the ad campaign that you’re running. Conversions are much higher when people are sent to the landing page that was ad-specific versus when people are sent to home pages that aren’t relevant to the ad campaign they were brought in by. Landing pages are valuable tools that anyone who is running a PPC (Pay Per Click) campaign should use.

1. Aren’t Testing Them

You should create a couple different (but similar) versions of landing pages and test out their effectiveness. For examples of small differences, try changing things like the length of the opt-in form, change the fields they have to answer before continuing, and so on. Other tests include the color of submit buttons, background images, page layout, and where you present your information. Google Analytics is great for testing landing pages and gauging how effective your different versions are. A service you could use to test different versions of your landing pages is Optimizely.

2. Stopping After One Test

You shouldn’t stop testing after you have a single successful page. Once you’ve established a winner that works better than your other versions, try improving on that winning version. If you assume that the version that performs better than the other ones is the best that it can be, you’re not doing yourself any favors and are missing out on potential improvements!

3. Only Testing The Obvious

Different headlines, offers, and call to actions are obvious changes. You can test completely different layouts of pages (perhaps one that doesn’t look anywhere near to what the control version looks like) and you might be surprised at the results! Test completely different designs, content, color schemes, and field forms and see what works best.

4. Not Using Analytics

Your measure of testing the landing pages is flawed. If you’re basing success on single factors, you aren’t getting the big picture. For example, if you’re using a tracking number on one of your landing page versions and it’s getting tons of phone calls, you might assume that that page is a clear winner. However, if you’re not using analytics, you could be missing out on other wins on that page or different pages. Maybe people are responding positively to the content on the page, maybe they’re staying on the page for longer than other pages or are rapidly clicking to other pages and are calling you from those pages. Make sure you’re using analytics software to ensure you’re getting the full report.

5. Test Isn’t Long Enough

You need to have more traffic than just a hundred visitors to determine whether or not a landing page is effective. A good number to shoot for is 1,000 visitors or more before coming to a conclusion. You need to test your pages for a long enough to be able to say that your results are statistically significant.

6. Comparing Traffic From Different Sources

You’re saying Landing Page A is the loser and Landing Page B is the winner but Landing Page A is all organic traffic and Landing Page B is all paid traffic or referral traffic from Facebook. Those are two completely different audiences and the conclusion that you’re coming to isn’t on the same playing field. You’ll want to test these as close to apples to apples as possible. Make sure that the traffic source is the same to ensure that the results aren’t being skewed.

Head over to titanwebagency.com/adwords for a free report that will help you fix your adwords. In this report, we reveal 10 mistakes that people often make when working with Adwords. We’ll give you advice on how to use keywords, how you should use keyword groups, whether or not you should be bidding on your own brand or not, and more!

If you need assistance with creating effective landing pages or are struggling with your PPC campaigns, contact us today so we can see if we're a good fit for each other.

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Check out the show notes at:

6 Landing Page Mistakes You Don’t Want to Make

6 Landing Page Mistakes You Don’t Want to Make

What was discussed?

1. Aren’t Testing Them

2. Stopping After One Test

3. Only Testing The Obvious

4. Not Using Analytics

5. Test Isn’t Long Enough

6. Comparing Traffic From Different Sources

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