Quick Tips to Improving Your Landing Page

Written by Zac Johnson
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Landing pages will play a very crucial role in your success as a pay per click marketer, and how you lay out your landing page can make all of the difference. Here are a few quick tips on how you can improve your landing pages and possibly increase your conversions. Remember, if you can split test your new modified landing page (after changes) vs. your original land page design, do it! If you continually modify your landing page with improvements or ways to better serve your customer/traffic you can heavily increase your earnings. How much more would you be making if you increased your conversion rate by only 1 or 2%?

REMOVE SITE NAVIGATION:
In most cases, when you have someone visit your landing page, you do not want them to jump around your site or possibly click and link and leave to another. If you have any type of site navigation that is distracting your site visitor from the one or two tasks you want them to take, remove them! If your navigation or site information is important and needs to remain on your page, place them near the bottom.

KEEP IT SIMPLE:
As much of a marketer or designer that we are, keep your landing pages simply and extremely easy to navigate. I know I can pretty much tell 100% of the time what parts of a web site are advertisements and what is trying to get me to go into a lead process, but that is because that is what we do for a living. Keep your web site simple and to the point.

AUTO-POPULATE & OPTIMIZE FORMS:
Another step to keeping your landing page simple. If you are using email to promote a campaign, or working in a co-registration type process, you should be able to collect previous information from the user and auto-populate that into your existing page. Not only will this save the user time, but it will heavily increase them in filling out the form if they only need to click SUBMIT or enter a couple more fields.

There are so many landing pages and forms out there that aren’t optimized. Don’t you hate when you go to a site and the TAB button isn’t working on the form and you have to click to each field! Imagine how badly that is killing conversions. If just 1 or 2 people out of every hundred get annoyed and leave, that is lost money. Allow your users to jump around the form process using the TAB button.

DON’T ASK FOR TOO MUCH INFO:
Why are ZIP and EMAIL campaigns so successful? Simple, they don’t ask for much. (on the first page at least). If you are looking to gain subscribers for a newsletter, ask for their email… it isn’t important to collect their full postal information if you are only emailing them. Also, too many forms out there have a RESET button… what’s the point, I don’t think many people out there are filling out the whole form incorrectly then need a button to reset it all over. In more cases than not, people will accidentally click the RESET button instead of SUBMIT. Once they click RESET, they will be so angry, they will probably just leave your site. REMOVE RESET BUTTONS!

KEEP TESTING:
How many of you create a landing page, then go live with the campaign and if it works, it works… I’m guilty! I hate testing, especially when something works on the first try. Testing is the most important part of advertising. especially on pay per click campaigns. Let’s say you currently have a landing page that converts on 2% of your traffic and you are generating 50 leads a day off 1000 visits. If you take the time to play with your landing page and are able to increase your conversion by just 1%, you are looking at a 50% growth and 25 more leads per day. TESTING SUCKS, BUT IT WORKS!

These are just a few tips that may help you in your ppc and landing pages adventures. I will have a follow up post with more “quick tips” and advice later in the month. Feel free to add any additional advice in the comments area.

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29 Replies to “Quick Tips to Improving Your Landing Page”

  1. Thanks for the post Zac.

    Do you have any real life examples of landing pages that you think are particularly well done? Either yours or someone else's. I know I'd be curious to see them.

    – Dave

    1. I don't have any at the moment to show you, but I may have an upcoming post on this and give comparison examples. Another thing I'm going to point out in an upcoming post is to look at your competition's web sites and landing pages to see what they are doing that you might not be.

      1. I'm looking forward to the post. Checking out your competition for ideas / pointers is always a good ideas as well.

        – Dave

      2. Comparisons would be fantastic.

        Maybe show a good one, and a bad one, and explain why you think one is good and the other is bad.

  2. Great Tips!.. I thought it was going to be the typical stuff but you made some good simple tips that will go a long way for a lot of people.

    Thanks Zac

  3. Thanks for a great post Zack.

    I have one question. I never understood how people throw around these figures of conversion (1%, 4%) etc…. what if you have various sources of traffic over a period of time… are you taking averages of each source of traffic per day? or is it an overall figure?

    Thanks

    John

  4. Limit navigation, keep it simple, don't ask too many questions. Never really thought about it before. Thanks Zac.

  5. Here’s another quick tip to elaborate on your navigation point:

    Add other links to the page that make it look like your site has different sections but that actually all lead to the same offer page. Examples of this may include things like “Learn More” and “Download”.

  7. The testing part got to be what is more time consuming, great info for beginners! 😉

  8. Hey Zac,

    Are you willing to share any affiliated landing pages you know of? Also, I thought that Google's Adwords was penalizing people for not having enough content on their landing pages or something? So taking out the navigation to other content places, wouldn't it actually hurt you (for PPC marketers at least)?

    Jay

    1. I will follow up with more posts on landing pages setups. Also, google is now tougher on landing pages, but the main requirements are still, about, contact and site info. Giving too many "unneeded" links to the user may force some off the site. I wouldn't remove the generic links which every site should have, just place them near the bottom so they are not a distraction from main content.

  9. I like the look of your landing page, this defintely is not a wordpress template. I am starting to get the hang of this I think.

    P.S. I subscribed to your RSS so I can keep up with your great suggestions. 🙂

  10. Removing navigation often results in a DECREASE in conversion rates.

    Yes, you can lose a lot of money if the rest of your site isn't monetized, but generally navigation = increased trust. People want to check around and find out about you before they make a purchase.

    Yes, it sounds counter-intuitive. Test it though. Test everything.

    I recently replaced our "hero shot" of a woman on one of our most popular landing with a photo of a labrador dog wearing glasses and a tie. We got a 7% increase in conversion on that page.

    Test your pages with navigation and then test them without. Do not assume anything at all.

    1. I agree, and depending on what you are promoting, a navigation system may help/hurt you. In the case of a sale or purchase a navigation system is usually key, and pushing them through your content is useful and trust worthy. If you are doing ppc arbitrage and looking to bring users from search to your landing page, then send them to the actual user page (advertiser) where you get the lead, then a navigation system is less likely needed.

      It's amazing how much a simple picture can influence conversion rates!

  11. any tips on how to implement your tips along with google's QS? it would seem that having no nav and etc would be ripe for google's QS to come down on you fast.

    1. It's not so much about removing your navigation links, it's about using them properly and not distracting the user with them. Make sure your pages have the basic about us, site info, resource links and contact information and you should be fine.

      1. Hey, do you have an example of a landing page you could show us? It doesn't have to be yours…

        And how do you make your landing pages? And does WP landing pages work?

        Jay

  12. For landing page metrics you can try our service Pagealizer . Pagealizer helps site owners get insight on how powerful their site content is. We show you in great detail how long people stay on your page, how far they scrolled down the page and where they clicked.

  15. Removing the navigation on the landing page is a good idea because you want them to stick around and read in to your offers! Great tips!

    1. I think removing the nav depends on what you're doing with the landing page….

  17. Zac , so let me understand this. You are saying make it simple ok this part i get.

    But in requards to landing pages and sending them to the the advertisers product page i dont get a few things. Like it seems odd to have a good landing page then have the user click thru to your landing page to the actual products landing page then have to click thru to the buy page. What is the best way to handle this? or should you just send them to the products landing page without me having to even make a landing page?

    Also if you are creating a landing pages are you saying make a different page for each keyword group send the traffic to a separate page with keyword targeted titles (all the same product in this example) or are you saying if you where peddling say laptops and your keywords have 5 different models for each model have a diffent page?

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