In the world of performance digital marketing, one thing is key. Conversions. Whether you’re converting an e-commerce sale or converting a prospect to a lead, as a marketer your job is to do so as quickly and as efficiently as possible. With that being said, as deadlines shorten and an immediate lift in sales is required, corners are often cut. Making sure your website/landing page isn’t one of those cut corners is crucial to the success of your campaign.
When preparing a multi-faceted, conversion-focused marketing campaign I often use the following logic: “Your campaign is only as good as the landing page you send prospects to.” This logic speaks to the necessity of a highly functioning web page to convert the prospects you’ve coerced through your funnel. You could have the best click through rates and the most highly targeted marketing activities in place but if your web page fails to convert the prospect, then it was all for nothing. After all, you’ve spent considerable dollars getting your prospects this far, don’t let your landing page be the thing that stands in the way of your conversions.
There are many different factors to consider when it comes to enhancing the probability of conversion for your landing page. Anything from content quality to user experience and even brand consistency all impact conversion rates. Making sure you’ve maximized your conversion probability through optimizing all of these factors is crucial to the success of your campaign.
User Experience (UX)
Understanding proper web UX starts with understanding your target audience. Morphing your UX to meet the needs of your audience while combining your strategy with UX industry best practices is always a good place to start. The goal is to give your audience exactly the information they’re looking for while requiring a minimal amount of effort on their part. In this instance, more information isn’t always best. Good information far outweighs plentiful information. This is best represented with the ideology of Quality > Quantity.
Diving even deeper into the UX of your conversion-focused landing page is the necessity of a quick load speed. Research completed by Google concluded the average mobile landing page takes 22 seconds to fully load. The research also stated that 53% of website visitors will leave a mobile page if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load (1). It was also found that each second longer that a mobile page takes to load, the more drastically the bounce rates increase.
The load time or “speed index” is a valuable metric to be tracking. As you can see, all industries are averaging well above the recommended 3 second speed index threshold. A lot of this has to do with the average size of the webpage that is being downloaded. This includes images, scripts, external files and everything else required to populate the page you’re intending to show the user. The average size of a webpage among the industries shown in the table is 1.88 MB. The recommended webpage size for an optimal speed index is under 500 KB. So as you can see, this is a common struggle for business, regardless of industry, to optimize their landing pages for maximized UX.
Google has made a simple tool for testing the speed of your pages. You can test it for yourself by using Google’s PageSpeed Insights. (https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/)
Content Quality and Brand Consistency in Lead Gen Campaigns
When it comes to the content of a landing page for lead generation purposes, brands often make the mistake of focusing too much on SEO in their copywriting. This often causes the copy to become mundane, repetitave and extremely wordy. By focusing so heavily on SEO rather than clearly and quickly providing users with the exact information they’re seeking, the likelyhood of conversion is severely diminished. In a lead generation campaign, conversion should be your main focus, your organic reach as it relates to your SEO efforts should not be.
Adjusting Landing Pages for Different Marketing Channels
- Pay Per Click and Programmatic Advertising
- If you’re funneling traffic to your landing page from a PPC or Programmatic campaign, the key to conversion is to bring users to the exact content they’re looking for.
- If this campaign is for lead generation, you should be explaning exactly what your product or service is in a way that is intriguing, to the point and with little effort required by the user.
- If this campaign is for e-commerce conversions, you should be driving users to the exact product page that the PPC or Programmatic ad told them about. If your PPC or Programmatic efforts take users to your home page or to a page other than the specific product stated in the ad, you are creating too many clicks between the time the user clicks on your ad and the time they complete the order. Minimizing the number of clicks is going to enhance your conversion rates immensely.
- If you’re funneling traffic to your landing page from a PPC or Programmatic campaign, the key to conversion is to bring users to the exact content they’re looking for.
- Social
Media
- When advertising on Social Media, brand consistency plays a huge role. Ensuring that your voice, branding and pricing are consistent across both your ad and your landing page is crucial. Users are able to engage with your ad on Social Media far more than through other advertising channels. Making sure you’ve provided them with the exact content they’re seeking as well as ensuring the messaging is in a manner that enhances trust through consistent branding is key. Users want to trust a brand and when branding is inconsistent, users will lose that trust and your conversions will suffer as a result.
#Convert
Next time you put together a conversion-focused campaign, make sure you’ve given your landing page the attention it deserves. Think about your site speed, the quality of your content and the consistency of your branding. Consider all of the possible barriers that are out there to prevent this conversion and find ways to minimize as many as possible. The quicker the user gets the information and the quicker they can complete the task at hand, the better chance you have at getting your conversion.
References:
1.) https://think.storage.googleapis.com/docs/mobile-page-speed-new-industry-benchmarks.pdf
Second image https://www.machmetrics.com/speed-blog/average-page-load-times-websites-2018/