This can actually be really annoying – you have invested quite a considerable amount of money and working hours into your business’ website, only to be advised to create a separate landing page for your online advertising campaign by some digital marketing professionals you’ve now hired.
It feels like those sneaky pros are trying to boost their budget, add some extras and absolutely unnecessary items to your tab. And you can’t help thinking – “landing page…? My website is wonderful and amazing, why can't they just use it for the campaigns. Nope, this is definitely ‘a trap’. Has to be! There’s no way I’ll go for the landing page option”.
Been there? Well, today we would like to share our thoughts on the matter with you and, although we are digital marketing professionals and therefore (slightly) bias, we will try to give you some reasons on why creating a separate landing page might be a very good decision for your business, even if you have a very good website.
1. When a user sees an ad (whether on Google search, or Social Media), the offer on that ad interests him and he clicks on it, he expects to see immediately and EXACTLY that offer on the page he goes to. Even better if the wording is precisely the same! If he lands on your website and right at the top of the page he can’t see precisely the offer he wanted (which was what made him click on the ad to begin with), he gets confused, disappointed and (with very-very few exceptions) he closes that window and leaves the website without buying.
The problem is that you cannot match each specific offer, of each ad you are running, to your website. First of all, you have everal products, so as you can imagine, using your homepage is not an option, for you can’t afford your entrance banner to always highlight just one product out of all your range. And even if opt for using specific product pages, you cannot physically match the offer, or wording, of all the ads you’re running to those pages. You will need to choose one offer, or go neutral and ‘in general’ explain why the product is good. In any case, you will not match all the ads. Or you will have to constantly edit your pages, which might not be the best practice.
If you have a landing page created specifically for an advertising campaign, you can match everything 100% between the ad and the page. You know exactly why the user clicked on it (he liked the offer on the ad) and you give him exactly that. The conversion rate will grow significantly if you keep things as specific as you can.
2. Similarly to the previous point, you might want to run a temporary promotion, or a 3-day special offer, and you might not have the possibility, or desire, to edit your website every time that happens. But if a user was promised by the ad a 50% discount in the next three days and he doesn’t find any information confirming this on the page he clicked to, he will not make a purchase, as he will think that either your ad was a clickbait, or that the discount is no longer available. Just trust us when we say he will not ‘send an email that he finds on contact page, to ask and make sure the offer is still valid’! Once again, a landing page is the perfect solution for this situation.
3. Another reason to create a landing page (or pages) is having several target audiences for your products or services. You might want to run a promotion only for one of them and you might not want to display a special offer, dedicated to only one segment, on your main website. You can create a separate landing page, not accessible from your main website, run a campaign targeted to that specific audience and bring that traffic directly to the landing page. Your other target audiences don't need to know about it.
Also, the landing page will help you with the relevancy of your ads and offers. You can create completely different content for each profile of your potential clients. For example, if you have a gym, you can create a campaign and a landing page for new-moms trying to get back into shape, and another one for men who are into bodybuilding. We imagine you might want to approach these two targets with completely different content on the page. Just create a landing page for each one, and you’ll see the growth in conversions.
4. Your corporate site is beautifully designed, but does it sell? Would too much of that ‘selling conversation’, ‘special offers’ and ‘discounts’ kill the elegant design? For sure it will. But you can put all of that on a landing page, leaving your website design as clean as you need it to be.
5. Is your CPC (cost-per-click) rather high in your Google Ads campaigns? Did you know that relevance and landing page experience are both factors determining how much you end up paying for a click in these ads? The more specifically your page’s copy matches your ad’s copy and chosen keywords, the easier it will be to win Google Ads auctions paying less. Can you match the copy on your website’s pages to all the ads (and keywords) you are running? We think you already know the answer to this one!
6. And finally, advertising is not your whole online strategy, right? You are also trying to rank well organically on Google. But guess what, lots of things that you need to implement on your website for SEO purposes are not actually helping out with the sales. For example, while internal linking (links between the inner pages of your website) and the time users spend on-site, on average, are important to SEO, you need users to buy your products and not just ‘hang out’ on your website, right? But a user might start browsing your website, clicking the links, reading the content, and forget all about the reason why he came to your website in the first place – to buy something. With a landing page, you can forget about SEO – use the page specifically for online ads and keep it separate from the main website. This will not hurt the SEO of your main website, but will give you the freedom to sell, by creating the page in a way that users will stay focused on your offer and, through various, difficult to ignore, call-to-actions, will actually make a purchase.
There are many more reasons you might want to use a landing page, but it’s even better if you create several landing pages, each one specific to a certain offer or audience. Hubspot actually ran a study that confirmed this. While most companies don’t see an increase in leads when increasing their total number of landing pages from 1-5 to 6-10, companies do see a 55% increase in leads when increasing their number of landing pages from 10 to 15.
Before you panic and tell us that there is no way you will ever be able to afford 15 landing pages, remember: a landing page is not a website. It is one page, which makes it way cheaper than what you have paid for the website! And once – after some testing – you nail the design, you may just keep on duplicating it, changing only the copy to match the sales offer you need to promote. At that moment you may have 50 landing pages, if you want to.
So, the next time you are suggested to create a landing page, don’t take it as an offense to your website. It doesn’t mean your website is bad, it means there is an extra possibility to boost your sales.
For more information, bespoke strategies and efficient digital marketing solutions, just contact the Clarity’s girls through info@yourdigitalclarity.com or visit our website at yourdigitalclarity.com.
