10 Landing Page Best Practices

Optimize Your Landing Page

When it comes to digital advertising, a lot of significance is placed on your display ad. Afterall, you can’t emphasize the importance of a great advertisement enough - given that, in many cases, this will be the first impression some people receive in regards to your brand. Of course, your display ad is also important due to the fact that it's what you rely on to get consumers to click. With so much emphasis being placed on display ad design and creation, sometimes other key aspects of digital advertising campaigns get pushed to the back burner.

However, an equally important aspect of any online advertising or Account Based Marketing campaign is the landing page.

Your landing page is what consumers see after clicking on your display ad. With this being the second visual people view, it’s fair to say that landing pages are the second-in-the line of importance to any campaign. While a shiny display ad can catch a user’s attention enough to garner a click, the real action happens on the landing page.

Here at El Toro, we bring our clients the precise, accurate, and reliable audience targeting they need. While this targeting can lift the performance of any campaign, it isn’t the only aspect needed. A great bulk of campaign success relies on the client and their end of the exertion. Proper display creatives and optimized landing page help create a full lift in conversions when paired with El Toro’s unparalleled targeting.

To view El Toro's Display Ad Templates or best practices, view some of our other blog postings, like Five Elements of Great Display Ads.

Typically, our team will recommend when running a campaign through our technology, host a landing page separately created from already existing web pages. While this lander could be one from your website, we find that it goes even further when an entirely new page is created for those coming to you from digital advertisements. In a recent survey, it was found that customized landing pages showed an increase in conversion rates by over 25%. With this in mind, a custom landing page is worth the investment to test whether it can help further drive your conversions.

With some core industry tips, we want to help you create a landing page that will help propel your conversions to their utmost potential. Here are our top 10 landing page best practices!

#1. Consistency is Key

The first step in creating a proper landing page from your display ad is ensuring consistency between the two. This helps establish trust with consumers, as some may be leery of clicking display ads or may not be familiar with your brand, this can aid in easing concerns. To avoid any confusion, lack of assurance, or displeasure from visitors, we find it beneficial to make sure your language, offer and overall creative themes are concise between ad and landing page.

#2. Keep it Simple

Too often we see organizations trying to cram as much information as possible into their landing page. The feeling of the need to get the entire company’s mission, purpose and offerings in front of consumers can encourage this mentality. However, when running a digital advertising campaign, this isn’t ideal for a landing page. Your online website exists for this full-view experience, not your landing page.

When it comes to a landing page, in order to keep the viewer’s attention, you want to keep everything as easy and simple as possible. A lot goes into this simplification, but by doing this, you can keep your content to the point and remove any aspects that could defer a visitor from converting.

a. Make the Offer Crystal Clear

The purpose behind most all digital advertising campaigns is getting users to convert. This said conversion can be a number of things depending on the company or brand, such as garnering a vote, selling a product, gathering contact information through a form fill, etc. You goal is to get users to want what you have to offer them. Whatever your offer may be, the more straightforward and clear you can make that offer, the more likely visitors will see, understand, and take advantage of that offer.

b. Have Straightforward Call-to-Action Buttons

What assists wonderfully in keeping your offer clear is having a call to action button. By this, you can really help your offer stand out to site visitors by having its own prominent display button. Make sure when creating a call-to-action button that you keep the intent behind that button as uncomplicated as it can be. Consider simple phrases like “Click to Join”, “Download Here”, or “Purchase Now”.

c. Provide Only One End Result

People tend to think that the more offers they push on someone, the more likely it is that they will take one of those offers. In reality, when it comes to a landing page, visitors need to be given one option. This goes right along the lines of simplifying your landing page. The more options there are, the more likely users are to get caught up in the muddle and bounce from your site. Instead, keep what you are offering to one outcome. For example, offer one line of products you’re looking to sell, or one form fill for contact information, or perhaps one button to donate. By keeping to one outcome, you give your visitors two options, convert or not.

#3. Keep Crucial Content Above the Fold

Nielsen Norman Group did a recent study and found that users spent 57% of their time on a page above the fold, meaning they spent over half their time on the first screen-full of content. From there, around 75% of visitor’s time was spent on the first two screen-fulls. This leaves the remaining 25% percent of time spent being minor and sparingly spent on the rest of the page.

While you can’t guarantee that visitors will scroll down your page, you can much more guarantee that visitors will see the top fold of your landing site. What should be done with that knowledge? Keep the most important aspects of your landing page, most likely your call to action, at the top of your page. Don’t let the most crucial facet of your page go to waste by having it at the bottom of the page where users may not even view it. Even if it means having to shift the flow of your landing page, it’s essential to have your most important content at the top of the page. This can help increase the chance of your visitors seeing what you have to offer and converting.

#4. Confront Any Objections

Take yourself out of your company for a moment, instead think from the perspective of an outsider, new to your product, service, or brand. From here, think of any questions a consumer would have before they would want to take part in what you have to offer. From there, answer the crucial questions a consumer may have in regards to what you have to offer on your landing page. By doing this, you can get ahead of any oppositions or suspicions that the visitor may have in regards to what you have to offer. Alleviating these questions and/or concerns can help you drive consumers even quicker to converting. As a prime example.. Consumer question: “What if I don’t like the product” Quote on landing page: “Our products come with a 30-day satisfaction guarantee”.

#5. Have a Strong Visual Presence

It’s no wonder so many humans respond better to visuals. About 20% of the human brain exists purely for vision. Along these lines as well, having strong color visuals has shown to increase the retention and recall of information by up to 80%. These are just a couple of reasons that having strong colors and visuals help increase consumer interaction and retention. Importantly, contrasting colors create visuals that are more appealing to the human eye, so give contrasting colors a shot in some of the visuals on your landing page.

#6. Contact Information is Critical

A number of consumers may have more questions about your product or service offered on your landing page, or perhaps questions about your company overall. Regardless of the reason why, having a customer that wants to interact with your brand beyond just a click is phenomenal. For a person to care about your organization enough to want to speak more with you or your team shows true dedication from the consumer. Therefore, it’s important to encourage this behavior among those that visit your landing page.

You can do this by leaving adequate contact information on your landing page for people to reach out and ask more questions. It’s also important to leave this contact information in an easily accessible space visually for visitors, making it as straightforward as possible. Phone, email, and address are applicable forms of contact to include. Social media links are a phenomenal addition as well as it can encourage people to continue interacting and viewing your brand across their social platforms.

#7. Incorporate User Reviews/Testimonials

Users want to know how credible your brand is from someone other than the company itself, and for good reason. Any company can go on all day about how terrific their product or service is, after all, that’s what marketing is. However, if the consumer perspective isn’t in agreement with this statement of exceptionalism, this boasting is in vain. According to a recent study, 84% of people trust online reviews as much as they’d trust reviews from their friends or family. It bodes well to increase your credibility by having proof of how exceptional your product, service, or brand is when it comes from a real-life consumer. Take into consideration including some reviews or testimonials from your current consumers on your landing page. This can assist in helping assure visitors that what you’re offering is as tremendous as it sounds.

#8. Test an Exit Popup

We live in an age of mindless web browsing. With this, users are bouncing from page to page online sometimes senselessly. A user may click on your ad, go to your landing page, but in the mindset of pure browsing, they go to leave your webpage to continue surfing the web with little thought behind the action. An exit popup is a great way to virtually ‘tap users on the shoulder’ one more time before they leave your site. With an exit popup, you can grab the visitors attention in the last effort and bold way. From here, you can either prompt them to remain on your site or perhaps prompt them to leave information with your company before exiting.

#9. Include Scarcity Techniques

A great way to get users to complete your call to action is to give them the impression that what you’re offering is scarce and/or time sensitive. For example, when it comes to product sales, consider the language, like “only 5 left in stock”. Perhaps you’re trying to get encourage signatures on a local petition, think about a phrase like “act now before it’s too late”. This scarcity tactic can easily push a sense of urgency into a visitor’s mindset. Users may then feel more encouraged to convert quicker than if the offer seems like something that will always be there.

#10. Make Your Landing Page For The Visitor

We hate to be the one to break it to you, but odds are that those visiting your landing page don’t care about your company or your product. What prompts people to click and convert is the sense that what they are getting is going to benefit them in some way. Consumers spend money where they think they are receiving something they want or need.

Your job is to leverage this knowledge. Include verbiage on your landing page that tells consumers why your product, service or brand is going to benefit them and make their lives better. This may seem clear and evident in the world of retail and sales, given that what you’re selling is something that consumers either want or need, but this goes even beyond the everyday retail sales. Take a nonprofit looking for donations as an example, a dog shelter. This shelter could use language like “Donate $100 to save a dog’s life”. To someone who loves dogs, this would help aid their desire to help dogs in need, therefore alleviating a want this consumer has.

In Summary

Consider some of these best practices when designing or editing your landing page. Here at El Toro, we want to work with you to optimize your digital advertising in every sense possible. Full optimization means having a stellar landing page in the mix. This, along with our tips on display creatives, and our own highly accurate ad targeting, all together combine to create an ad campaign that is set to drive conversions to their highest potential.

To learn more about how you can get involved with digital advertising through El Toro, reach out to our team, learn what we do and how we can help businesses like yours thrive.