PPC Lead Generation Landing Pages: Five Elements of a Great Page

Some people call landing pages “squeeze pages”. I don’t. I call them landing pages because when I think of “squeeze” I think of Darth Vader making orange juice…

PPC Squeeze Page
Fresh Squeezed PPC.

 

But that is NOT the point of this post. The point of this post is to explain the FIVE elements of great Pay Per Click lead generation landing pages. Lead-gen is our bread and butter and we’ve cycled through many iterations of landing pages. Our experience boils down to five things:

1. Build Trust

The look and feel of the page have a significant affect on this. Clean design goes a long way. Other elements that help build trust are trust symbols (BBB, certifications, awards, credits, ect), testimonials, phone number, address, and social signals (G+, FB, and Twitter follower counts). Though not always included a privacy policy close to your form is a great way to assure people you won’t abuse their information. Did you know that including a privacy policy improves quality score too? Placing all this near your form typically improves conversion too.

2. Overcome Objections

What is it that holds your customers back from buying? Is it the high price point? Then show the value in your product. Are there many substitute goods in your market? Do a side by side comparison highlighting your strengths. Does your product seem hard to install? Show a video of someone installing the product. Address their concerns and overcome them so they are more willing to take action. This question helps guide the content strategy which we will discuss next.

3. Relevant Copy

When someone searches for “fresh squeezed orange juice” your landing page needs to talk about “fresh squeezed orange juice”! Pretty simple right? Not so much. Beyond that you need to know WHO it is you’re talking to, including their demographics and pyschographics, and tailor the page to them. The difficult part with this is replicating across dozens of keywords. We usually go with themes or use dynamic keyword insertion. We’ve also used dynamic city insertion with good results. In the end, relevancy helps both Quality Score and conversion. We’ve found that following the “SEO optimized page” practices will land you high QS marks for landing page.

4. Focused

Eliminate distractions is the name of the game. Take off that navigation! Don’t ask for more info in the form than you need! Captcha? No way! Once you determine what the goal of the page is (capture the lead) then everything on the page should help move them to take that action. How your form is structured is a big part of this; if you need a lot of information split it up into multiple steps so it seems less daunting, in multi-step forms ask for personal info last, put first and last name into one field, don’t ask how they found you, etc.

5. Trackable

Knowledge is power. That is especially true with the data Adwords and landing pages can give us. You should start with Analytics and tie it back to Adwords to see how each keyword performs. However, the key piece of data that many marketers look past is tracking the quality of leads and tying that back to Adwords data. Leads/conversions are not created equal so knowing which are of high value is paramount. We not only track that but also automate the bidding of lead quality through Marin Software (Avalaunch Media PPC is Marin Certified yay!).

BONUS – Don’t forget about your thank you page! This page is more than just a place for confirmation code. It’s an opportunity to upsell, reinforce your brand, tell them what to expect when they get a call, have them subscribe to your blog or social pages, or more. We should call these pages “More-than Thank You Pages”

Creating a landing page is like going to bat. With past experience you try to hit a home run on each page, however you’re not going to hit it over the wall every time. Once you’ve created your page you need to test and optimize your page to continually improve your conversion rate! Eventually you’ll knock it out of the park.

12 thoughts on “PPC Lead Generation Landing Pages: Five Elements of a Great Page

  1. Stu says:

    I am a big advocate of big, bright, red arrows on landing pages. Okay, I was in 2009, and I still believe arrows have their place. Arrows or not, the landing page does need to keep the visitor focused on taking the action you would like them to take. When you look at your landing page, you have to ask yourself the following about each element, “does this element of the page distract the visitor from what I want them to do?” If it does distract, get rid of it!

    Loved the part about the thank you page. Great post Luke!

    • LukeAlley says:

      Haha, I thought of you and arrows after I published this yesterday. We haven’t written them off yet. 😉

      That’s a great question to ask also!

  2. Cleofe Betancourt says:

    #4 is HUUUGE. I’m dealing with a client now who has a million ideas, and wants every one incorporated into their new LP! I will share this article with her in hopes that your words help sway her

  3. JTech says:

    We use landing pages more for the SEO value than for PPC (which we do occasionally do). I think the biggest difference between a pure SEO landing page and a PPC landing page is that the PPC landing page, or even a more focused SEO landing page, needs to have only one thing that the page is trying to do and focus everything on that.

    Our landing pages aren’t as offer driven, they are farther up the sales funnel, and we use them to draw users into our site and to begin to educate them about our industry and our company. This means that there isn’t one particular path that we need the user to follow. While we do have a call to action on the page to call us it is still a win for us if they continue to look around our site for a while. We still need to be focused, it just isn’t the laser focus perspective needed with PPC.

    Also, I think that even the most focused PPC landing page still has a chance to rank well for the right keywords. I don’t have enough experience with PPC to know for sure, but based on the way our landing pages rank I think it could be done. Does anyone have any experience with that and how well it has worked out for them?

  4. Grace Minton says:

    I’ve spoken with a lot of PPC companies, but the most important thing that you can actually do to your marketing campaign is landing pages. Try out this company results driven, call them at 325-446-1507. They are by far the best marketing company to go with since they not only create solid PPC campaigns for you, but they also do landing pages, CRO and re-marketing which are all 100% necessary elements of a successful online marketing campaign. Most companies sell you 1 single thing such as CRO, or just PPC, or just popups, etc. This is completely ludicrous because while 1 thing may make a difference in a stable marketing campaign, there is no single element that is a make or break element in online marketing, you need the entire package, and then hone/optimize from there.

  5. John Carter says:

    Here’s a question you should be asking yourself about your PPC: Are the correct negatives being added to your account based on empirical analysis, and are precautions being made to make sure these negatives do not conflict with active keywords? As in, are you blocking the bad traffic with negative keywords based on real data? If not, consider what that’s probably costing you in wasted ad spend. Just note that you don’t want to throw in just any variation of keywords into the negative space because you don’t want to create conflicts with the good working keywords. I had Simon help me out with this before. I’m sure he’d be willing to talk to you too if you just give him a ring at 219-733-4687 and tell him you need some help with your PPC campaigns.

  6. Akash Agarwal says:

    Nice article. I have learned many things from this article. Thanks for sharing this valuable information.

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