14 PPC Landing Page Best Practices

Are you tired of having people bounce away from your website? Even the best websites experience bounce rates of up to 80% at times, but by using these PPC landing page best practices, you’ll be able to manage your rates more effectively. A lower bounce rate means more chances for a sale, so first impressions count. That’s why having a high quality landing page is one of the best tools that you can have in your marketing arsenal.

It is important to remember that your landing page is always the starting point for a potential customer.
Just because you believe something is going to work doesn’t mean that it will actually work. Your customers and your visitors will dictate the ongoing design of your PPC landing page. Start with these tips, listen to their feedback, and don’t be afraid to make a change so that you can lower your bounce rate.

1. Your Headline Needs to Match

Confused customers are people who won’t buy something from you. The fastest way to confuse them is to create different headlines between your advertising campaign and your landing page. Make sure that your headlines match so that you will instill a sense of confidence in that first time visitor.

2. Don’t Save the Call to Action For Last

The average website visitor is going to spend 30 seconds at most reading the content that you developed for your landing page. That means you need to have an effective CTA within the first 30 seconds of reading time to make the most impact. If you keep your call to action above the fold, you’ll typically experience more conversions. A best practice is to include a CTA within the very first paragraph of content.

3. Let Your Graphics Direct Your Customers to Where You Want Them to Go

This goes back to the point of confusion. The user experience of your landing page needs to be clear and direct. The best way to do this is to graphics, such as arrows or other cues, that will show them where they need to go in order to become a customer of yours.

4. You Need to Have a Focused Message

Your landing page has had one specific job to do. People have clicked on an ad to come to this landing page, so its job is to create a conversion. The biggest mistake any marketer can make is to create content on their landing page that is more about personal ego than customer satisfaction. If you make the landing page about you, your bounce rate will go through the stratosphere. Always make it about meeting the customers needs through a focused message that clearly points out how you can solve a problem.

5. Make Sure You Show How Your Product Works

Evidence in action will always be the best current point that a landing page can provide. This is why crowdfunding campaigns with video marketing that includes a prototype in action raise the most money. This principle also applies to your landing page. You need to provide evidence that your system, or product, or idea actually works. It can’t be through testimonials or your marketing content. It has to be real live action.

6. Videos Always Work Better

Although you need marketing content that can be read for indexing purposes and relationship building, videos work better for the direct sale. Conversions are up 80% on landing pages that have video content on them compared to landing pages that have no video content on them. The trick to having a good video is to make it long enough that you can explain the value of a product, but not make it so long that a visitor needs to invest a massive amount of time to watch the video from start to finish. Great videos are five minutes long at most. A three minute video should be your target.

7. People Can Spot a Fake From a Mile Away.

There are a lot of freelancers today that are making some bank by providing false testimonials on products or services that are being offered. The only problem is that the average customer is going to be able to spot fake reviews in an instant. Authenticity is what will rule the day. If you want to get a higher conversion rate, then you need to get people to review your product for you. Those reviews then need to be put onto your landing page as a best practice. Even if that means you get random strangers trying out your goods or services and having their reviews of it on video, that’s better than paying someone to create a false testimony that could ultimately get you in trouble.

8. You Need to Have a Guarantee

A business that is unwilling to stand by their product is a business that is going to experience high bounce rates on their PPC landing page. Lifetime guarantees will always gain a potential customer’s attention. Comprehensive guarantees of any time will still show that you’re willing to stand behind your product. It’s the 14 day guarantees where a customer has to jump through certain loopholes and not get their shipping charges refunded that will create higher bounce rate.

9. Provide a Preview of Your Product Whenever Possible

This landing page tip is primarily geared toward those who are selling information as their primary product. What sets your information apart from all of your competitor’s information is the quality of it. Higher quality will always lead to lower bounce rates. To prove that you have a higher quality of information, a preview that is provided for free will show evidence of how good you really are. Free previews are also a chance to get an email address so that you can build your marketing list for future success.

10. Make Your Marketing Content As Easy-to-Read As Possible

There are a number of ways that you can partition the content of your landing page so that it is fluid and easy for the average person to read.

• Bullet points will help to make specific facts stand out from the rest.
• Bold fonts and underlined phrases will naturally draw a visitors attention to that place in the content.
• Simplify your sentences as much as possible so that information can be easier to retain.

Think about the last time you heard a parent talk to their toddler. They didn’t use compound sentences and huge words that their child didn’t really understand, did they? Parents use simple sentences with simple words so that they can get their point across. That’s the principle you need to use as a best practice for your PPC landing page.

11. Make Sure That People Can Contact You in a Way That Works Best for Them

Whether you post your phone number on the landing page, a direct link to your email address, or you post your snail mail address so that someone can send you a letter, your contact information needs to be included so that a prospect can speak with you on a time that is convenient for them. This allows you to still get conversions in the future, even if the initial contact ends up increasing your bounce rate statistics.

12. Your Homepage is Not Your Landing Page

This might be the biggest error of them all. A great home page can be a good tool to use for sales, but it’s not a good PPC landing page. The goal of the landing page is to create more interest in the product that you have. People aren’t there because they want to do more research about who you are or what you have. Visitors click on an advertisement because they’re interested in purchasing your product right now. The average home page is not designed to get people to purchase something right now.

13. Segment Your Landing Page

The two best ways to do this is the segment by traffic source and segment by user type. By having separate landing pages for separate marketing campaigns, you’ll be able to better match which channels are performing the best for you so that you know how to best engage with your prospect base. Different users also have different points of view that they want to have emphasized in a sales pitch that is directed toward them. People interested in workout routines are not necessarily going to be interested in how to make donuts.

14. Trust by Association Can Lower Your Bounce Rate

If you can have a landing page that has a trusted brand or logo on it that is willing to co-sponsor you, then the trust a prospect has for your partner trust will also become your trust.

Using these PPC landing page principles can quickly lower your bounce rate and potentially increase your conversion rate. Don’t be afraid to edit your page regularly so that you can get more effective results. Listen to the feedback prospects send you, respond quickly to any questions people may have, and in return, you will have the tools that you need to create an awesome landing page that will create massive conversions.