How to Make a Good Landing Page: The PPC Advertiser’s Guide

Knowing how to make a good landing page makes a massive difference to your pay-per-click (PPC) advertising campaigns. When you design a landing page that offers a better user experience, you’ll see marked improvements in key metrics, including your Ad Rank (Quality Score & CPC), bounce rate, and conversion rate.As these factors improve, your costs will fall, ultimately helping you earn a higher return on investment (ROI).

In this guide, we’ll show you how to make a good landing page, covering each vital step to make it easy for you to deliver an experience people won’t forget.

What are the most critical aspects when designing a landing page?

When you’re learning how to make a good landing page, you should focus on the following:

1. Relevancy of landing page
2. Define your unique selling point (USP)
3. Show your product/service in action
4. Tell people what they need to know
5. Make your landing page mobile-friendly
6. Simplicity
7. Make your call to action clear
8. Remove distractions
9. Provide transparent policies
10. Leverage social proof
11. Minimize loading times
12. Build engagement
13. Optimize for voice search
14. Social Sharing & Feeds.
15. Test and update

Let’s look at each one in more detail.

1. Relevancy of landing page

Here’s a common mistake in PPC advertising:

You promise one thing in your ad, but when people click it, your landing page fails to deliver that promise. For example, your ad may offer a 10% discount on brake pads, but when people arrive on the landing page, it offers a 5% discount on brake discs.

This inconsistency will deter users, and your business will lose out on possible leads and conversions. You must create relevant landing pages that align with your ads — and with user intent.

2. Define your USP (unique selling point)

Is your ad and landing page closely aligned now?

Good. Now, it’s time to define your unique selling proposition, which is how you differentiate your offer from your competition.

Your ad may address a problem that your target audience needs to solve. With a strong USP, you can show prospects that your product or service is the best solution available.

For example, if you are a quality pizza delivering company and you are best at coping with your delivery time you must emphasize your quality and your delivery time on the landing page.

3. Show your product or service in action

Humans are visual creatures. If they see products or services in action, their appreciation and desire to have it will increase.

You can experiment with these ideas to improve engagement on your landing page:

• Still photos
• Animated explainer video
• User tutorial video
• Carousel shots that highlight specific features
• Infographic

Also, it gives you a chance to explain the product or service in more detail, answering any common queries, and dispelling doubts before they arise. For example: if your landing page is having steps to complete by the user, escort them in a way that keeps the interest active for the user. Like:

Step 1: Fill the form

Step 2: Get the offer

Step 3: Get Paid

4. Tell people what they need to know

Nowadays, there is zero room for fluffy content, especially in paid advertising. Your ads and landing pages must get to the point – fast!

Use your landing page to explain only vital information that prospects need to know, such as:

• Benefits of your product or service
• Pricing and purchasing options
• Business contact details including physical location and phone number
• Social media channels and email address

Focus on the essential information to maintain interest and build credibility with your landing pages.

5. Make your landing page mobile-friendly

In the mobile age, nobody wants to deal with confusing websites. Therefore, you must create landing pages that offer smooth and straightforward navigation, right to the point of sign-up.

Make your landing pages mobile-responsive, so users on smartphones and tablets can quickly scan through the page, and complete any action that’s required.

Here are a few pointers:

• Compact images – Make your images small (in dimensions and file size). This will speed up your loading times and make pages easier to view.
• Reduce typing demands – Keep things simple for users.
• Avoid auto-downloads – This annoys users by taking up space in their device.
• Avoid auto-play videos – Intrusive audio can embarrass or annoy users, especially if they are watching videos in a public place.
• Minimize animations – Use color effects and GIFs sparingly to speed up loading times. Provide animation if it is really required to show some demo otherwise don’t use it.

6. Simplicity

Learning how to make a good landing page may seem scary, but here’s the best tip of them all:

Keep it simple.

Here’s how:

• Simple and direct copy
• Clear, direct headlines
• Minimalist design with plenty of white space to enhance the information rather than hiding it.
• A clear call-to-action (CTA) that tells users what you want.
• Fewer colors
• High-readability

Here is the example of clutter vs. simple and clean landing pages.

Keeping it simple will lead to better results in terms of engagement, clicks, and conversions.

7. Make your call to action clear

No landing page is complete without a strong CTA.

Whatever your product or service is, and however you make your offer, you need CTAs at decision points on the page to drive action.

Consider these strategies for better CTAs:

Less is more

It’s a good idea to avoid having too many CTAs. It may be best to use just one at the very bottom of the page. That being said, having another CTA above-the-fold is a popular choice.

If you decide on that, make sure you also include vital information above-the-fold, so users have those details to guide their decision.

Make it count

Have you ever seen an action button with the word “submit” on it?

This is a common choice, but not a great one because it lacks strength and inspiration. Instead, you want to incite action.

Create a stronger CTA that gets people to react. For example, “Don’t miss out on your FREE download” is better than “download now.”

Step-by-step structures

Outline how easy your visitors will find your product or service to use. With clear, easy-to-follow directions, the value of your offer becomes undeniable — and often, irresistible.

8. Remove Distractions

Here’s something you should keep in mind when you want to know how to make a good landing page:

You must focus on a single conversion goal. Just one.

Therefore, anything else that distracts from your goal is surplus. Get rid of all distractions, external links, and unnecessary CTAs, images, or information that dilutes your message or invites users away from your landing page.

Ideally, you want to streamline the journey on your landing page to funnel leads to your final CTA.

9. Provide transparent policies

As we move into 2020, consumer privacy matters are at an all-time high. The data breach scandals of Facebook, Yahoo, and Quora caused panic, and the General Data Protection (GDPR) regulations have taken effect across the globe.

Now, you must be transparent with the processes and practices you use for collecting, storing, and sharing consumer data. If people can’t trust your brand, you’ll never make a sale.

Follow these tips to nurture trust with people:

• Use cookies toolbar to notify people that you track on-site behavioral data.
• Use terms and conditions page to outline what your business is responsible for, and what it’s not.
• Share your privacy policy, so people understand how you use consumer data.
• Publish an FAQ page that answers common questions people may have about your brand, and your products and services.

10. Leverage social proof

Imagine your company provides analytics services to major corporations. Once you have one or two big clients in your portfolio, you can leverage those relationships to convince others to convert.

By getting positive reviews, you’ll have strong social proof from happy customers — that pay well. That can be enough to sway other top-tier clients.

To maximize this strategy, try to get video testimonials. Video content is much more engaging, and it will be a high-impact addition to your landing page.

11. Minimize loading times

Speed is crucial in the customer journey. Nobody wants to wait around for a slow website to load, especially on mobile.

Here are some tips to slash your loading times:

• Use Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), as this is an important ranking factor of Google’s Mobile and Desktop Indexes.
• Use compact-sized images and files.
• Minify your HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files.
• Opt for client-side scripting rather than server-side.
• Use CDNs (content delivery networks)
• Reduce redirects
• Enable compressions

12. Build engagement

Shoppers have a lot to choose from online. You need to work hard to convert prospective new customers, tailoring your marketing tools and techniques to engage your site visitors in ways that they appreciate.

For instance, you can harness data insights with a live chatbot feature, or utilize pop-up discounts that cater to each visitor’s interests.

These techniques keep people on your page and make them consider your offer or brand as an option.

13. Optimize for voice search

In 2019, voice search enjoyed significant growth, primarily driven by the improvements in voice-enabled technology. Alexa, Siri, Cortana, and Google Assistant are battling it out to be king in voice-enabled devices, and with it, they are changing search engine optimization.

How?

Well, people who use voice search tend to do things a little differently than those who do a regular text-based search.

So, when you’re thinking of how to make a good landing page in 2020 and beyond, you should think about the following:

Focus on user intent

When people use voice search, they usually have a particular need, such as:

• The address or opening hours of a store.
• The price of a specific product.
• Whether a business offers a specific type of service etc.

Keep user intent in mind to create content that answers specific questions, providing answers to things people want to know.

Google may be a smart search engine, but it needs all the help it can get. The better you optimize your content, the easier it will be for Google to analyze it — and promote it.

Use schema markup

Schema markup makes it easier for search engines to comprehend the content of a webpage. Consider your website, your audience, and the CRM editing capabilities to use the right schema markup that will help you get noticed by voice searchers.

Use long-tail keywords

Voice search queries are typically conversational in style, often framed as questions or full, grammatically-correct sentences.

You can incorporate these long-tail, conversational keyword phrases into your landing page content to attract targeted traffic. As a bonus, this defined traffic is often cheaper.

14. Social Sharing & Feeds

Show your social feeds and tweets on your landing page to show your presence on social media. Once visitor purchase or do some conversion, make it easy for them to brag about their purchase and share their experiences by adding links to all types of social media. It will increase your credibility and presence on social platforms.

15. Test and update

Like everything else in PPC advertising, your landing pages are not a set-and-forget task. Once you publish your landing pages, you must keep an eye on the analytics to gauge their performance.

Try A/B testing several ideas to determine the most effective version of your landing page. For example, you could test out two versions with different:

• Headlines
• Benefits
• Images
• CTAs
• CTA positions

Run variants for a while, gather the data, and then analyze it to identify which version generates more clicks, leads, and conversions.

This process of testing and monitoring should be ongoing, helping you continually update and improve your landing pages, eliminating flaws, and optimizing strong points to create the best possible user experience.

Remember only to change and test one aspect at a time. This makes it easier to determine the impact of the change. For example, test images one week, then pick the best image. Next week, test headlines, then select the best headline. The following week, test CTAs, etc.

Wrap Up

So, now you know how to make a good landing page. By analyzing these areas and putting in the time and effort to optimize each one, you’re sure to see dramatic improvements.

PPC advertising requires patience and strategy, more so than a big budget. Learning how to optimize your landing pages is crucial to maximizing your ROI.