Product Specific Landing Page Tips
I previously wrote two posts on “Quick Tips to Improve Your Landing Page“, but what if you want to target towards specific products or services. Are you going to send traffic from your ad campaigns to your home page and hope for the best, or should you setup individual landing pages and campaigns for each product? Below I have included a few tips for you to use when building your product specific landing pages and campaigns.
1.) Don’t Sending Traffic to Your Home Page
Everyone loves to send and receive traffic to their home page. Unfortunately, when paying for search marketing, this is usually not the best scenario. When you send traffic to your home page, you are usually giving your users too many options and most will get frustrated and immediately leave. Instead of sending potential customers to your home page and offering several products, create multiple landing pages and ad groups based on different products. Not only will you provide your customers with what they are looking for, but you should also see a dramatic increase in conversions.
2.) Tell Your Customer What they Want to Hear
How many times have you gone shopping and asked a salesperson a direct question about a product, then they go on to tell you everything else about it and not what you wanted? If you are going to create landing pages to promote individual products and services, make sure you make it quick and easy for the customer to find what they need. Always provide a title, picture, description, specs, dollar amount and an easy to fund “Add to Cart” or “Buy Now” button. These are the most obvious fields everyone is looking for. If you have more in-depth information to offer, you may want to add additional pages or provide it below the actual listing.
3.) Repeat the Search Term on Your Landing Page
Sending your targeted traffic to a landing page which points them to a product or service they are searching for is excellent. Being able to further monetize that page is even better. If possible, try and incorporate the “search term” that was used in your advertisement, and have it re-appear on your landing page. Additional methods for increasing conversions and order sizes, are to include related products.
Quick Case Study:
I went to Google and did a search for “buy flip camera“. The first listing was for Amazon.com, who are one of the best (if not the best) in landing pages and converting sales. Before setting up your landing pages for product specific items, take a look at some of the big retail sites like Amazon.com, Buy.com or Walmart.com. All of these sites are very clean and to the point, providing the buyer with the basic information they need, then more specs and user reviews when you scroll down. The call to action on all of these landing pages it to buy the product.
Amazon.com Success: Title, Product Name & Picture, Price and Add to Cart
Once you have created your product specific landing pages, continue to test and compare what’s working and what could possibly increase your conversion. Remember, if you are currently converting 3% of your customers to a buyer and can increase that 4%… you are looking at a 25% increase in sales. Your landing pages and testing are key to your success.
Nice post. It's remarkable how much energy people put into selecting keywords and then botch it all on the landing page.
And BTW, WalmArt.com… Hilarious…
Ooh, that link seems to be being generated by some script. My bad… I guess you accidentally capitalized the "A" instead of the "M" and the script did the rest.
Amazon is "clean" but I'm not sure it's QUICK to the point. Most of us are so used to it's interface that it's all very recognizable. But I think there's a bit too many options on the page. They can get away with it, but sites with more first time buyers and unique navigation can't.
Great points. Never send traffic to your home page… 🙂
This was a good post but i need a little clarification in requards to you comments about "Don’t Sending Traffic to Your Home Page" What if you are advertising only one product or service then what would be the disadvantage to sending them to your home page? or are you mostly referring to if you had say a review site about say "tvs" and you where reviewing them but each had a separate landing page for that ad group. This makes alot of sense for sure. But for a product that your site is exclusive to what is the best plan of action?
Thanks for the tips Zac i agree on getting 25% more sales
Yeah I have to agree on sending traffic to the specific pages rather than homepage.
I would say that amazon is one of the least optimized sales pages around. I buy from them because I trust and know the quality of their service.
Their conversion rates on those pages must be pretty low though. The focus of the pages for me is the customer reviews rather than the buying process. Add to that the fact that there is practically zero sales copy.
Amazon does well because of the great distribution, low prices, and the huge traffic they get.
Nice post and great tips especially about the homepage traffic, it doesn't convert well even with blogs. I prefer getting traffic to article pages than the home page.
I think sending targeted traffic to a no-frills page with a very clear call to action is literally the only way to get this kind of thing done. You are fighting so hard for attention and commitment to an action anyway, why confuse the user any more?
Good stuff…I have a bush-league landing page, that I am going to pimp out with this information.
@Matt Warren:
Excellent point. I was very surprised to read about Amazon in terms of "best landing pages" on the web. Their conversion rates is one thing, but it certainly has nothing to do with their optimization or landing page tricks. Their layout is clear, their prices low, they offer vast range of products, online orders, are international and reliable: all those points together make them the best in their field. I am sorry, but Amazon is not a suitable case study at all for this post. Unless it is expected of us to build an e-commerce or e-store with multiple products. The Amazon reference is so off the mark here that I now wonder about the validity/reliability of the other posts written on this blog…
I disagree with Matt and Dee. Amazon pages are both search engine and conversion rate optimized. Part of the reason they get so much traffic is that they show up on page one in lots of shopping related queries, and a study from Nielsen of the best converting online retail sites attributed a 10% conversion rate to Amazon, which is incredible considering the range of products and millions of pages they have.
Why do their pages perform so well? The 3 points Zac laid out are certainly present–distinct product-specific landing pages, a clear CTA, and repetitions of the search term throughout the page. The clear layout and customer reviews that Matt and Dee mentioned are also definitely part of it, not to mention the massive amount of information.
This bucks the trend of what most search marketers will tell you–that anything below the fold will be ignored. It's more important to address customers' potential objections with adequate information that allows them to make an informed decision. Gone are the days of impulse buys–people want to be over-informed these days if anything.