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Important Reasons To Use Landing Pages For Paid Campaigns

A Landing Page is a standalone page, designed for a specific campaign. Landing pages have a call-to-action that is very specific to the goal of your campaign. Landing pages are not homepages. Understand the differences between landing page vs website page. In this article, I will cover 7 reasons why you need to use landing pages for paid campaigns.

Download the landing page checklist that you can use to build your next landing page.

7 Reasons Why Use Landing Pages for Paid Campaigns

1. Post Click Experience

Landing pages offer a great User experience. There are lots of factors that work together to build a great UX. Elements include things like:

A. Page Speed

According to Unbounce, 70% of people admit page speed impacts their willingness to buy if your landing page loads slow, stop everything and fix it. Use tools like Google Page Insights to find root cause issues and aim to fix them.

B. Relevance

When building effective landing pages for paid campaigns, one of the first things to consider is whether your messaging aligns with your paid ad. After all, when your visitors land on a page that no way matches the ad they clicked on, how long do you think they will stay?

Most often then, they’ll bounce and hit the back button in their browser.

The solution? Message matching. In other words, adding search keywords in relevant moments on your landing pages, and ideally, you matching the heading of the ad copy with the heading on the landing page.

For PPC marketers, that means aligning your ad copy and the copy above the fold on your paid landing page. It would help make it as easy as possible for potential visitors to know they are in the right place. Otherwise, they are much more likely to bounce.

Let’s try this out in the real world.

So if am planning to launch and startup and want to start with an MVP first, I could be searching for a tech company who can help me build my MVP. So I could go to Google and type in the Keyword MVP development.

Notice these 2 search results which show up

The first one is from Airdev the ad links back to the homepage and as expected the homepage is generic and not focused on MVP development. At this stage, I am left to my own decision of figuring out how to navigate to the MVP page.

But let’s check this other example from Altoros where they sending paid traffic to a dedicated landing page that focuses on startup growth and the overall MVP development. As a user, I don’t have to spend too much time figuring out how to navigate this landing page as most of the information is presented to me, which is relevant to my original intent.

C. Minimize Distractions

With landing pages, you can make changes that minimize distractions and keep the user interacting with your landing page.

For example, you can remove your main menu from your landing page so that the user focuses on the landing page content and conversion point you are offering.

You also don't want to have many (or any, if possible) buttons or links leading away from your landing page (unless you are sending them to another relevant landing page that offers more relevant content and a similar conversion point).

Here is an example from DOOR3 where there is no distraction on the landing page like navigation and external or third-party links.

best example of a Landing Page For Paid Campaign

2. Personas Match

You can match your personas with your landing pages. When writing content and deciding on imagery, ensure you have at least 2 or 3 personas created so you can ensure the language and tone of voice matches your target customer. I would strongly recommend not to use 1 landing page which targets every single audience.

e.g. If you are creating a PPC campaign to drive new leads for your CRM software, there will visitors

Who already use CRM software and have good knowledge and understanding of how a CRM works and its terminology like leads, deal pipeline, lead scoring, etc.
However, there could be new businesses who know they want a CRM for their business but have no understanding of any technical jargon.

We can easily break these audiences into 2 personas and split various features, messaging, benefits, etc to match their profile.

Next time when you run a PPC campaign, think you are using a ‘one size fits all approach or niching down to match your target audience.

Let’s compare these two examples from Bequest.

For their life insurance product, Bequest wants to target first-time home buyers persona and also target the persona – new parents

Now when we check out the landing page, the copy, imagery, and style match the buyer persona, creating relevance and trust.

3. Intent Match

When running paid campaigns we usually target high intent keywords like buy life insurance, car finance quote, or software development consulting. All these keywords are high intent, which means the prospect is looking to either buy or try to find a solution to their problem.

As a marketer, you should capitalise on these queries and have relevant landing pages which push prospects to take an action. I recommend not using your typical website as landing pages as they are aimed at audiences with varying levels of intent.

With a user’s attention span being so short, you have to take your chance to convert PPC traffic to your landing page quickly before they leave.

I worked with a client to create comparison landing pages, these are intended for prospects who were considering the saas product and comparing the app with one of their competitors, and I am sure you must have come across these pages. Here is an example from Zoho CRM who is taking on SalesForce for the keywords Zoho vs Salesforce.

4. Hosting/Separate Infrastructure

Hosting Landing Pages on a separate infrastructure. Although this may not sound like an immediate benefit having a separate reliable infrastructure for managing your landing pages is a must.

If you are running ads and spending money on every click you want to ensure those clicks drive traffic to a website that exists.

Unfortunately with CMS systems like WordPress, your website could be offline because of one of many issues which could in turn not just cause you panic but also money and leads.

Hence, I recommend investing in a Landing Page builder tool like Unbounce which hosts the page for you and you can rely on their infrastructure.

5. AB Testing

Here is the biggest reason I recommend using landing pages for PPC campaigns.

AB Tests. You can run various AB tests with landing pages, and the insights you collect will improve your marketing channel, lead quality, and overall conversion rates.

For example, a landing page can help identify the most efficient channel for generating leads. The insights generated by a landing page can also help determine the right message or call-to-action that will increase conversions and increase quality score, resulting in a lower cost per lead.

You could test hypotheses like – should I ask for users’ phone numbers, or just names and email? You can run an AB test on your landing page to determine if adding a field for a phone number increases conversions.

In conclusion, landing pages are an invaluable part of a PPC campaign and will not only help improve paid campaign performance but will directly impact the bottom line of your business.

6. Conversion Tracking

Landing pages are designed for visitors who are interested in the product or service. They provide limited information so that visitors are not overwhelmed by unnecessary details. When you use a landing page, you can track conversions. A conversion could be that one desired action you want your users to take.

For example, a form fills or a click-through to the next page or signing up for a free trial.

At least one trackable point of conversion to ensure you're measuring your landing page performance. After you define your primary conversion, you can then track other metrics like:

Secondary conversion rates, e.g. video views, click on a button, page scroll rate, time-on-page.

Using tools like Google Analytics, HotJar or CrazyEgg, you can measure these various data points and come up with hypotheses to test.

7. Improve Ad Campaigns

Landing pages improve paid search campaigns; when running google ads, you will come across a system google uses to grade your ads better known as quality score.

Quality score is an aggregate of different factors these are:

Your ad click-through rate (CTR)
The relevance of each keyword to its ad group
Landing page quality and relevance
The relevance of your ad text

One of the important factors in this score is the landing page score. The higher the landing page score, the better your Quality Score, which means the lower your cost-per-click. In simple business, you will spend less money and rank higher than your competitors.

Utilizing dedicated landing pages for your paid advertising campaign allows you to track how your paid traffic is performing with your landing page. This will allow you to continuously analyse what works or what doesn’t work. Check out my article on AB testing.

So having dedicated landing pages for all of your paid ads is essential to track, optimize, and initiate action on your landing pages.