Landing pages are the bottom of the funnel in PPC. Even if you get your keywords, ads and bids right in your AdWords campaigns, it will be hard to realize great ROI through PPC without a landing page strategy.
Once you've got the click and the prospect is off the SERP and on your site, you're tantalizingly close to sealing the deal – but without a clean, well-designed, relevant, and persuasive landing page, you can lose them as fast as you got them.
In our experience, landing pages are a constant challenge for PPC advertisers. Here are some of the obstacles that AdWords users face:
- Building Landing Pages is Hard: Generally you need Web development resources plus a graphic designer and a hosting environment in order to set up PPC landing pages. It's hard, it's time-consuming, and it's expensive – particularly for small businesses.
- Most Landing Pages Suck: Earlier this year we looked at the landing pages of several hundred small businesses — it wasn't pretty. Just under half of them were being managed by some external third party (e.g. the advertiser's brother-in-law's friend), which made it very difficult to make changes to landing pages. As a result, less than half of advertisers had conversion tracking set up, and about a third of them were just sending traffic to the home page.
- You Can't Build Landing Pages in AdWords: Even though you need landing pages to complete the PPC puzzle, Google doesn't help you build them. You're on your own.
We've been listening to our clients' questions about landing pages and taking note of their pain points. And today, we're excited to announce a huge improvement to our PPC Advisor software: Landing Pages & Leads. This new toolset aims to make landing page creation, management, and analysis easy and attainable for small businesses, busy advertisers and PPC agencies.
Let's take a look at how it works. Check out the video below, or read on to see all the tools.
WordStream Landing Pages & Leads: Simple, Complete, & Made for PPC
Landing Pages & Leads is a set of tools to help advertisers close the PPC loop, going all the way from keyword to click to conversion. This new toolset, including a landing page builder and lead management tools, has three huge benefits for AdWords advertisers and PPC agencies:
- It's Complete: PPC Advisor is now a start-to-finish PPC management solution, with all the tools you need to get started in PPC and then cross the finish line. We also provide a ready-to-use hosting environment while still enabling you to publish to your own subdomain.
- It's Simple: Landing Pages & Leads empowers you to create, edit and publish effective PPC landing pages, using a step-by-step wizard, without requiring the involvement of your IT team. It's fast and easy.
- It's PPC-Specific: Landing Pages & Leads is designed specifically for PPC. It bakes in best practices for PPC landing page layout and design and ensures that your landing pages tick off all the boxes.
There are so many potential bottlenecks in landing page creation and landing page optimization. (Where do I start? How do I get the development resources? How can I promise results to my clients when I'm not in control of their websites?) These tools remove as many of those bottlenecks as possible, getting the landing page part of the PPC equation done fast and done right.
How WordStream's Landing Page Builder Works
Landing Pages & Leads includes a Landing Page Builder that walks you through the process of creating a well-designed, conversion-optimized landing page. It's an intuitive, point-and-click interface with a preview on the right, so you'll be able to see what your landing page looks like as you build it.
Landing Page Theme
The first step is to choose your landing page's theme, which will define the look and feel of your landing page.
In this section, you can personalize your page:
- Choose a color palette and background color
- Upload a company logo
- Choose a main image for your landing page
Landing Page Content
The next section is content.
Here you can write the headline and body copy that will appear on your page. The goal of this copy is to paint a compelling picture of your offering so that your prospect wants to complete your desired action.
Some quick tips for acing the content on your PPC landing page:
- Your headline will do most of the work, so focus on writing a strong headline – it's the only part some visitors will read! Consider using a landing page headline formula to get you started.
- Write clear, concise copy that communicates the benefits of whatever you're offering.
- Use bullet lists, bold text and other visual cues that tell readers what information is most important. After all, you don't want them reading your short story, you want them to fill out the form.
Landing Page Form Builder
Along with the headline, the form is one of the most important levers on your landing page. A well-designed form can have a huge effect on your conversion rates.
With the Landing Page Builder, you can create a completely customized landing page form, from header to footer:
- Choose the fields you want to include and which fields will be required, including standard fields (like name, email, phone number, job title, website, etc.) and custom fields (such as text fields, dropdown menus and checkboxes – see below).
- Choose a call to action for your form button – tell users what they'll get when they complete the form!
- Create a thank you page that users will see after clicking the button. You can upload an asset, such as a white paper, and paste in your conversion code so you can track form completions.
Landing Page Settings
In the final step you can adjust your landing page settings.
These settings include:
- Your landing page URL
- Analytics code and scripts (for tracking traffic to your landing page)
- Your landing page footer, including any desired links, such as a link to your company home page
Once you've completed the setup process, you can save your new landing page as a draft, preview it, or publish it with one click. Your finished landing page might look something like this:
Now you've got a conversion-ready landing page, without having to drag in developers or graphic designers!
Tracking and Analyzing Your PPC Leads
We've analyzed thousands of AdWords accounts, representing over $2.5 billion in total spend, through our free AdWords Performance Grader. And we've found that over half of accounts don't even have conversion tracking set up. This gaping hole in PPC protocol means that those advertisers have no idea what's working and what isn't. They're flying blind.
The whole point of having landing pages, of course, is to get leads through PPC. Landing Pages & Leads helps ensure that you're in a position both to get more leads and to understand why and how you got them!
In the Leads section of the tool, you can:
- Get detailed lead tracking information for deep insight into which keywords and landing pages are driving the best results for your business.
- Check your landing page conversion rates.
- Export all your lead data.
Landing Pages and Lead Management in WordStream is Awesome
We think this is a pretty major upgrade to our PPC software. To reiterate the awesomeness:
- One-stop shopping: You can do most PPC tasks in AdWords, the problem being that it takes a lot longer in AdWords compared to a PPC management tool like WordStream, which is much more guided and automated. But you can't build landing pages in AdWords at all – you're on your own there. With PPC Advisor, you can do all your PPC stuff in one place, including landing page creation and management.
- Major efficiency: The wizard-like interface drastically cuts down on the time it takes to design and publish new landing pages for your PPC campaigns. This is key for your overall success, because a greater number of more specific, targeted landing pages will greatly increase your conversion rates.
- Baked-in best practices: Our tools make sure you're following best practices for PPC landing pages, which means you'll get more form completes, more measurable results, and better Quality Scores.
We can't wait to show you how cool this is! You can try it now with a free trial of PPC Advisor.
This post originated on the WordStream Blog. WordStream provides keyword tools for pay-per click (PPC) and search engine optimization (SEO) aiding in everything from keyword discovery to keyword grouping and organization.
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