Before optimizing your page, it is important to understand how users see your page. People read a landing page similar to how they would a book or magazine – they scan from left to right, then diagonally across and down the page and then finally back up to the top. That means you need to put your message across the top and the next most important piece on the right. Keeping this basic pattern in mind will help while you take a look at your copy, images and conversion form to help improve your landing page performance.

While these are a list of best practices, there isn’t a sure fire formula that works for everyone. As with all things in PPC, it is important to test variations until you find the right combination that works for you. The Google Website Optimizer tool is a great way to test different pages to see which elements perform best and are contributing to a higher conversion rate.

Make sure your headline is visible and relevant. Headlines should be relevant to the user, convey your key benefit and be located at the top where the user is going to look first. Try to work in your keyword into the headline to help a visitor confirm they clicked on the correct ad and improve your PPC quality score. Ask yourself if the headline reinstates the users potential problem or gives a brief definition of the service/product offering. If yes, then you are on the right track.

People don’t actually read landing pages, they scan. Think about it, when was the last time you read an entire landing page top to bottom? Keep your copy short, sweet and to the point. Give the important facts and experiment with using paragraph form versus a bulleted list of short statements. You might find that a bulleted list performs much better.

Design a clean, simple and visually appealing landing page. A few images can help bring a page to life, but keep images to a minimum. A landing page should lend itself to a quick and simple recognition of the ‘key message’ and should not be confusing. Too many images, callouts or messages create clutter and confuse a user. Keep in mind that visitors have likely been searching through several ads and landing pages before getting to yours, if they don’t quickly see what they are looking for, they are gone. You have 3-6 seconds to get your message across, make sure your visitors doesn’t spend that time trying to focus their eyes.

Strategically position your conversion form on the right. Going back to how people read landing pages, after scanning the headline, a visitor’s eyes are going to move to the right. If you have a conversion form, place it on the right-hand side to follow the behavior. If you have a shopping cart button instead, follow the same logic. Make sure any required fields are marked with an asterisk or similar notation. If you have a phone number field that won’t accept dashes or dots between numbers, explain this and provide an example so people aren’t discouraged if it doesn’t work correctly. They will not try to submit multiple times, so make sure it is as straightforward as possible.

Simplify your conversion form. Cut down the conversion or contact form to as few fields as possible to help minimize the visitor’s perceived risk of submitting information. Do you ever use the telephone number to follow up with customers? If not, don’t make it a required field as you may be funneling out valuable leads by requiring the information. Users consider what information is being requested and how long is it going to take to fill out the form before deciding which action to take next. If users feel you are asking too much based on what they are getting in return, they are gone. Sometimes it is better to get more conversions with less information than to get very few conversions but a complete history and profile on a person. Make sure you weigh what is important for your business strategy and adjust accordingly.

Keep the important stuff above the fold. Headlines, forms, and call to action should all be on the top third of the page in order to help guarantee a visitor sees it. Make sure you prioritize the elements on your page along with your content – if you don’t prioritize it for your user, they will on their own and may take away the wrong message or action.

Tell people what they are getting, in plain English. No one wants to submit personal information unless they are sure they know what they are getting. No matter what you are offering, whether it is a PDF whitepaper download, catalog in the mail or simply a request for a follow-up call, make sure you spell out everything a user is getting prior to them filling out the form. They want to know what the reward is before they hand over their contact info.

Keep quality score in mind along with user experience. Make sure you include keywords on your page to help improve your PPC quality score but also consider load time. Page load time is also a factor in quality score, and you have roughly 3 seconds – any longer and your quality score is likely being impacted. Avoid using flash animation, which can increase your load time and result in usability issues for some users.

Allow people another place to go from there. Include a logo that links to your homepage or other deep links within your site. A visitor may not be ready to commit yet but are still interested – give them an option to learn more about your products or company.

Try different messages, images, layouts and colors to find a combination that gives you the highest conversion rate. You may be surprised what a few simple adjustments can do for the performance of your PPC campaign.

Landing pages are obviously an integral part of PPC campaigns, and we’re conducting a survey about landing pages to better understand how businesses utilize them. This short survey (15 questions; 5 minutes) will provide us with lots of valuable data about this facet of PPC. We’ll share that data with you after the survey ends so you can benchmark yourself against other PPC Hero readers!

To increase participation, we’re giving away five $50 Amazon gift cards! To be eligible, complete the survey and include your email address in the final question. The survey closes at 5 pm EST on Wednesday, May 12, and we’ll announce the winners the following day.

Thanks in advance for participating!

If you do not see the survey below, please click here to take the survey.

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I’ve always been behind the philosophy that telling customers what to do on your landing pages or website is much better than letting them figure it out on their own. After all, that’s what marketing is, right? We lead them in the direction we want them to take; to see our new product, new offers, new promotions, new content, etc.

However, if you’re working with graphic designers to design a website, I must say, they typically don’t like using buttons. Buttons are also known as a ‘call to action’. We’re calling the customer to take an action. Buttons can certainly ugly up a page if too large, too colorful, or too in your face. The up side to these kinds of buttons is: they work. Adding buttons or calls to action on not only your landing page but throughout your website can help increase conversions and conversion rates exponentially.

For a large client of mine, we had a landing page dedicated for user submissions requesting more information. This page was accessible via top hand navigation on all pages of their site.

What I did was add an additional ‘request more information’ button to the body of all the pages of the site that also takes users to the same ‘request more information’ landing page. Just by adding these buttons consistently throughout the website we increased our conversion rates 8% and conversions by 33% in one month.

Sometimes customers can actually ignore (although not on purpose) top, left or right hand navigation on websites, especially if they’re looking for content.  So by adding your call to action clear within the body of your content they may be more likely to take that action.

Here are a few tips I’ve tested using buttons that have worked wonders for me:

1. Add multiple buttons throughout your website (be sure not to be too annoying though)
2. Make your buttons above the fold  – very important
3. Set your buttons to a different color from the background of your page to make it more visible and stand-out more to the user.
4. Be precise in the verbiage you’re using on your buttons, don’t just say, submit, but rather, ‘Get your free Info Kit Now’.
5. Wherever there is a button, there is a form to be filled out. Be sure to send customer’s confirmation pages/emails confirming you have received their information and how to contact you with questions.
6. Be sure to make your call to action a button, or button like. Some people prefer to use text link calls to action that don’t necessarily have the same effect as regular buttons.

Adding buttons to your site are not difficult, you’re graphic designers should be able to create a unique button in about 2 minutes or less, and programmers can program them to a site in about the same amount of time. They’re a great way to increase conversions and conversion rates for your PPC account. If you haven’t convinced your marketing team that adding buttons to the site will help, use Google’s website optimizer, which allows you to test a version of your landing page with the button and one without the button. Website optimizer will then show you conversion rates on both conversions. Not too many people can say ‘no’ when numbers are there backing you up!

The multivariate testing allows you to add in a piece of code to your landing pages and test showing that change 50% of the time to your users.  Meaning, 50% of the time users will see the updated or changed landing page, and 50% of the time users will see the original landing page.

After a few days or weeks you can check on your multivariate test to see which version of your landing page is generating the higher conversion rates. So, what should you test you may ask? There is almost no limit to the things you can test on your landing pages.  But here’s a tip, test one element at a time. Or set up multiple multivariate tests so you can test one change on your landing page but have multiple of those tests running.

For example, with multiple multivariate testing you could have one test running where you simply change the headline, another test could be adding a larger call-to-action button, another test could be adding a form to your landing page rather than a link. All these tests can be run separately, but at the same time.

Here is a full list of items we came up with that we feel are important to test to help increase conversion rates:

PPC

1.Call to action

-          Location on page

-          Color of button

-          Copy on button

2.Form/Shopping Cart

-          Length of form

-          Link location

-          Content of form (required fields and such)

3.Headline

-          Color, size, font

-          Copy (including keywords)

-          Location on page

-          Subheadline – yes or no?

4.Copy

- Tone (Sales, Emotional, Urgency)

- Structure; a lot of copy, versus minimal copy

- Format (bullets vs. paragraph)

5. Trust Symbols

-          Testimonials

-          Case Studies

-          Trust Logos

-          Client Logos

Additional Test Elements:

Contact Forms

Colors on landing page

Images on landing page

Flash on landing page

Video on landing page

Drop-down vs. basic navigation

Offers/Promos

Conversion funnel (singe vs. multi step)

Featured Products

Shopping Cart Funnel

- Process

- Add to cart button

Before you begin testing these elements of your landing page, consider these tips first:

Step 1: Know what you are trying to achieve

• Conversion action
• Audience – Know your user intent

Step 2: Know your value proposition

• What are the product benefits?
• What is the benefit of signing up now?

Step 3: Layout your testing strategy + follow it

• What will you test at each stage?
• What is the objective of each stage?

Step 4: Landing Page Testing >> Where do you start?

• See list above!

Website optimizer is something everyone should be using especially in today’s economy. It’s not a difficult process to do the multivariate testing, Google even gives you or your developer detailed instructions on how to add the code to the back end of your landing page.

I have tested several different aspects of my client’s website and have found the tests to increase our conversion rates each time except for one which made huge leaps and bounds in the total number of leads we were generating.

A great way to help increase your CTR and conversion rates is to take your top  performing keywords, and put them into new campaigns, targeting each state individually. When you write your ad text, be sure that state’s name is in your title and if possible in your description line. This will help increase your click through rates because even if people aren’t typing in a state or location specific keyword, tailoring your ad text to the users location still makes it a custom ad specific to that user.

In addition to tailoring your ad texts to that particular location, you can also customize your landing pages by using dynamic landing pages for a particular location. Now personally I think making 50 different landing pages with a state name in the title is a bit much. However you can create one landing page with dynamic titles that will change depending on the users search query.

I would try testing out a few of your top performing locations before making the big leap into creating 50 different campaigns targeting all 50 states. One place you can look is Google Analytics to find out which location is driving a majority of your traffic.  Simply login to your Google Analytics account, under visitors to the left, click on ‘map overlay’.  Scroll down below the map and you’ll see a list of countries, click on United States, and that will give you a breakdown of each state within the US. If you sort by visits, then you’ll get the state with the most visits first. You can see in the screen shot below, for my PPC account Indiana and Kentucky drives the majority of traffic to my website. Therefore I could create two new campaigns and landing pages targeting Indiana and Kentucky specifically to increase conversion rates.

Not only can you increase your conversion rates by taking users to a more specific landing page targeted to their location, but you can also increase your click-through rates with your new location targeted ad texts. By increasing your CTR’s you can easily increase your Quality Scores and decrease your cost-per-click without losing position. It’s a win-win situation.

If you’re like a lot of companies, running tests on your landing pages used to involve numerous meetings with your IT department, development hours in order to get everything designed and launched, as well as additional time to analyze the active tests. Your life as a search engine marketer got easier when Google launched Website Optimizer. If you have access to your landing page code, and you have some basic coding skills (or someone in close proximity does), then you can quickly launch tests, analyze the results and adjust accordingly.

With Website Optimizer you can run all of your testing in one location. (And no, this isn’t a paid plug for for this tool. We just think it’s extremely helpful!) You can monitor your tests, make adjustments as needed and improve your conversion rate. As far specific technical requirements are concerned to launch tests with Website Optimizer, I’ll leave that to the help section of the official website.

However, once you have your account open and your ready to start improving your landing page performance, what exactly should you be testing? Here is a list of landing page/website elements that you can test in order to learn what appeals best to your audience.

Headline: Your headline, along with almost every other element on our landing page, needs to be relevant, timely and appropriate for your audience. First, your headline has to assure the user that they’ve landed (pun intended) in the right place. In this vein, your headline needs address the core concern of someone who arrives on your page. From the first second of a user’s arrival, you need to tell them that you have the answer to their search.

There are numerous ways to write and test great headlines. Here are just a few ideas for testing new headlines:

• Try using emotional copy that will appeal to the user’s hopes, dreams, fears, aspirations.
• Test customer-focused vs. company focused headline (example: We can make your lead prospecting easier vs. You can make your lead prospecting easier).
• Split test using questions against declarative sentences.
• Try using longer headlines that are loaded with benefits against shorter headlines that focus solely on setting up the conversion.
• If you have headline copy that works well, then you can test the different font sizes and color.

Body copy: This is where you back-up the claims made in your headline or PPC ad. If your PPC ad inspired the user to click and the headline has convinced them to read further down the page, then your copy needs to do the heavy lifting.

Your body copy also needs to be relevant to a user’s search, benefit-driven, and written in the manner in which your audience expects. By this last point I mean that you need to know how colloquial, formal or technical the language on your landing page should be.

For the purpose of improving conversion rate, here a few body copy elements to test:

• Try using short text against longer text.
• Test copy that is more emotionally driven, rather than technical or feature driven.
• Your copy should always be relevant, but you can test inserting more of your high-traffic keywords into your copy.
• See if a list of benefits helps increase your performance.

Call-to-action: By this I could mean a few different things: the phrase that you use on your landing page for the desired action, or perhaps the button that users click on to go to the next step in your conversion funnel. Either way, you need to test it.

In regards to actual text, you should test a few different phrases to see which appeals to users best. Does a shorter call-to-action such as, “Sign Up’ work better than a more detailed one such as, “Get Your Free Guide Now.”

Also, you can test the color of your call-to-action buttons. Usually when there is an article written about landing page testing, someone mentions the button color. But it works and it’s worth testing.

Contact form: In the past, I have found that the next two are the hardest to test. The difficulty lies in the fact that the contact form is usually tied to a database. And if the contact form is damaged in anyway, then the leads will not populate correctly. However, if you can adapt, then this can be a quick win for testing.

For contact form testing, you should try out:

• Different lengths of your form. Try to using a longer form, and then try a version that is short enough to get above the fold.
• Ask fewer questions. How much information does your sales team need to follow up with a lead?
• How many required fields do you have? Can you make some of them optional?
• In regards to contact information; do you display your phone number on the landing page? How many calls do you receive from your landing page? Try removing the phone number to see if this inspires people to fill out the form.

Trust/Credibility symbols: Does your industry have certain certifications that will display your level of expertise and help build trust with your audience? If you don’t have them on your landing page, you should test this out. Also, if you’re accepting any type of payment, displaying safe-purchasing symbols can help improve your conversion rate.

Try out different offers: This is a quick one: you can highlight seasonal  or time-sensitive offers on your landing page. This is pretty straight forward. See which offer generates the best response and use it again at the same time the following year or even the next month.

Mini-site vs. Landing page: Once you have conducted a series of tests on your landing page and you feel that it’s as good as it’s going to get and you’ve hit the point of diminishing returns, then it might be time to go back to the drawing board. By this I mean you may need to completely re-think how you use landing pages. However, at least when you start this process, you’ll have a control landing page that you can test against.

With this tactic, you may to test out a mini-site or a multiple-step conversion process. Or if you’re using one of these longer forms, you may want to go the opposite direction and use a shorter landing page.

If you want more ideas on how to optimize landing pages for higher conversion rates, you can check out our podcast series, PPC Hero Landing Page Optimization Podcast.

For more in-depth information on landing page testing, I highly recommend Tim Ash’s book, Landing Page Optimization. And I also recommend Always Be Testing by Bryan Eisenberg and John Quarto-vonTivadar for additional information on Website Optimizer. Very helpful resources!

Keep in mind that there is a cost to landing page testing. Some of your tests are not going to be successful, but your results should improve over time. Optimizing your landing page is a continuous process that will lead to enhanced results when executed properly and with care.

The PPC Hero team has provided an analysis of the well-formatted elements of the landing page, as well as some ideas which could be tested to continually improve PPC conversion rates. Our discussion focuses on the following areas:

• PPC ads/keywords – Branded terms are pretty much always going to convert at a higher rate than most other keywords, but using longer-tail keywords or more descriptive keywords may help with conversion rates as well. We also discuss how specialized ad text gains search volume and lowers your cost-per-conversion because these keywords are likely to have a higher conversion rate than the generic “girl’s coats”.

• Landing Page Graphics – The design of the page matches the content: fun kids coats. However, we do suggest testing a plain background. The brightly spotted background distracts from the design and color in the coats, so a plain background will help the products pop more. Also, the logo at the top is slightly pixelated and might look more sleek if it were cleaned up a little bit.

• Landing Page Navigation – The links at the top of the page should be the most important – if the mailing list sign up and size charts are not your most important links, move these down and replace them with higher priority links. On the landing page itself, you could test having each of the photos lead to product categories, not individual products, as another way for people to easily navigate to what they want. A third point on navigation we mention here is the mailing list signup. If you want people to sign up for your mailing list, you might want to put a box where they can submit their address directly next to the call at out the top of the homepage. People are more likely to fill it out if they can do it without having to navigate to a different page – there’s more immediacy.

• Landing Page Trust building – We mentioned a few things that you can highlight to build credibility with users including: About Us, Returns Policy and Secure Ordering Symbols. These should all be at the top of the page. You could also highlight benefits of the products’ quality like: machine washable, superior workmanship, or special orders available.

Visit the www.KidsCoats.com site and follow along with the PPC Hero team’s suggestions for various elements of the landing page!

Download MP3 podcast files:
1. PPC Hero Landing Page Optimization Podcast – KidsCoats.com (13.3 MB, .mp3)

You will need the Adobe Flash Player to listen to the podcasts.

Here is a quick snapshot of KidsCoats Landing Page:

KidsCoats.com Homepage

Are you interested in having your landing page critiqued by the PPC Hero team? Don’t be shy! We’d love to hear from you. Check out our submission guidelines and send us your information!

The PPC Hero team has provided an analysis of the well-formatted elements of the landing page, as well as some ideas which could be tested to continually improve PPC conversion rates. Our discussion focuses on the following areas:

• Page aesthetics & trust- a clean site design establishes credibility & encourages user engagement, but reducing clutter and adding trust symbols such as association & certification logos can convey trustworthiness to website visitors.

• Conversion methods- multiple, prominently visible conversion methods on the page give users many opportunities to convert. Language changes could improve calls to action and color changes could draw more attention to some of the conversion methods offered.

• Website and landing page content- the site offers a plethora of useful information for potential clients and answers questions clearly. Testing some navigational changes on the landing page for important site content could help users find the information they’re looking for more quickly.

Visit the www.first4lawyers.com site and follow along with the PPC Hero team’s suggestions for various elements of the landing page!

Download MP3 podcast files:
1. PPC Hero Landing Page Optimization Podcast – First4Lawyers.com (7.8 MB, .mp3)

You will need the Adobe Flash Player to listen to the podcasts.

Here is a quick snapshot of First4Lawyers Landing Page:

First4Lawyers.com Homepage

Are you interested in having your landing page critiqued by the PPC Hero team? Don’t be shy! We’d love to hear from you. Check out our submission guidelines and send us your information!

The PPC Hero team has provided some tips on some elements of the site and PPC account structure that could be modified to provide a better user experience, PPC quality score, and increase overall conversion rates. During our discussion we focused on these areas:

• Keywords should be placed in specialized ad groups by searcher intent, and should also appear in the ad text for their ad group and on the landing page.
• Using “trust symbols” such as association membership symbols or security symbols on the site can increase visitor trust and increase the likelihood of conversion.
• Including a link to your privacy policy is important both from a user standpoint and for your landing page’s quality score with Google Adwords.
• A concise contact form is appropriate, but the page should give users an idea of the benefits they will directly receive by filling out the contact form, direct them to fill out the form, and make it more apparent (in a headline for the form) what action you want them to perform.
• Using different methods to geotarget searchers may assist in reaching a wider, but still very relevant, audience.

Nick’s core keywords include:
houses for sale, houses for rent, rent to own houses, homes for sale, homes for rent

Download MP3 podcast files:
1. PPC Hero Landing Page Optimization Podcast – GreensBoro500.com (12.7 MB, .mp3)

You will need the Adobe Flash Player to listen to the podcasts.

A sample ad text reads:

Greensboro Houses
$2000 Total Move In!
Quick, Simple Process.
www.Greensboro500.com

Here is a quick snapshot of GreensBoro500′s Landing Page:

GreensBoro500 Home Page

Are you interested in having your landing page critiqued by the PPC Hero team? Don’t be shy! We’d love to hear from you. Check out our submission guidelines and send us your information!

With these challenges in mind, our fearless PPC Hero team has provided some tips on solving some of these problems. During our discussion we focused on these areas:

• If Business Plan Pro is the main driving keyword for this site, then the keyword density could be enhanced.
• Opportunities to improve the flow of the landing page.
• Include more features and benefits.

Nicole’s core keywords include: Business Plan Pro, Business Plan Software, Business Plan, Business Planning software, Writing a Business Plan, and Business Plan Template.

Download MP3 podcast files:
1. PPC Hero Landing Page Optimization Podcast – BusinessPlanPro (14.5 MB, .mp3)

You will need the Adobe Flash Player to listen to the podcasts.

Here are a couple quick snapshots of BusinessPlanPro’s PPC Landing Page and it’s homepage:

Business Plan Pro's PPC Landing Page

Business Plan Pro's Homepage

Are you interested in having your landing page critiqued by the PPC Hero team? Don’t be shy! We’d love to hear from you. Check out our submission guidelines and send us your information!