How to create a landing page that works

Who are you talking to?

As an advertiser or affiliate marketeer, having drilled down insights in to your target market is always step one. It’s always good when your page views are high but when you’re interested in conversions that’ll eventually bring in money then you also need to know how to design a site that appeals to your target audience.

A landing page will grab the attention of visitors if it answers the most basic of all customer questions: “What’s in it for me?” To sell the benefits of your product and service well enough, you need to know who they are and what they’re looking for.

Segmenting your audience – and working up a typical customer profile – is vital when planning and scheduling performance marketing campaigns. Your ad spend will be better focused, driving genuine leads to the landing page.

Pick the best platform and tools

The actual creation of a landing page is much easier than you think if you’re using the right tools. A lot depends on how much of the design, build and update work you’re outsourcing, and how much you’re doing in-house. Also, which platform your website uses eg. WordPress, Squarespace, Weebly, Shopify, Drupal etc.

With most platforms, you can create “drag and drop” pages but some landing page creators will make your life even easier (if your HTML and CSS skills are limited).

Research all the options – such as Unbounce, Clickfunnels, Landigi, Thrive (great for WordPress users) and Instapage – to find the one that best suits your business goals. Maybe you already have a landing page included in your box of marketing tools? Some marketing automation solutions and CRMs have landing page builders included in their packages such as Hubspot, Act-On, Zoho, Salesforce and many others. So, you don’t have to waste your budget on extra tools.

The platform and tools you opt for will offer a series of plugins. These are extra functions to help you interact with landing page visitors. Don’t use too many, as that can slow your site down too much.

Mobile First

A few years ago mobile traffic took the lead ahead of desktop for the first time. Making it necessary for marketers and advertisers to adopt Google’s “mobile first” strategy. Make sure your website is mobile-friendly! Because Google is penalizing sites that are not mobile-optimized and your site won’t be ranking as high as it could in SERP (search engine results pages).

What’s more, if you’re buying a lot of mobile traffic then it’s absolutely crucial that your landing page is fully mobile optimized. That way it offers a great user experience that will lead to a sign up or registration. Therefore, it is a must to invest some time in mobile landing page optimization!

Landing page layout

Whether you’re building a new page or improving an existing one, content and design are going to be the key! This includes creating a landing page that grabs and holds visitors’ attention.

Make sure your page design is clean – avoiding overpacked or “fussy” content. Choose a few hard-hitting images, rather than lots of complex slideshows.

Consider content placement on your landing page too, such as menu bars and quick links. The more distraction there is, the less likely the user will finish the desired action.

This is all to make sure that your website landing page is quick to load, and easy to navigate. Your ultimate aim is to improve user experience (UX). Site visitors will find what they’re looking for, without working too hard!

This is mainly supported by lead capture forms. These forms generate leads, as you ask people to fill the form out with their contact information and offer them a deal, ebook, or something similar in return. It’s important to carefully think through the form’s design. It should be easily findable, including only essential questions and not too lengthy. Lead capture forms can be often combined with calls to action (CTA). For example, if your visitors like what they see, how can they buy, register or enquire? A well placed “button” can promote your call to action and capture initial interest. It’s smart to place it above the fold or top of the page.

It’s essential to create ad creatives that match your landing page, to make the transition seamless when users click through to the website from the ads.

A/B testing your landing pages is the easiest way to see which one is the most effective. For that, create two different landing pages and use them simultaneously. Analyze the results afterwards and look into details to discover which one of the pages works better and what you should change to further improve the performance.

There are some fantastic tools out there that help you to understand even further how your site visitors are interacting with your landing page. For example, with Hotjar and CrazyEgg you can see the heatmaps, site recordings and analyze users’ behaviour and see where they click and scroll. This helps you to test and optimize accordingly.

Also, keep on tracking your results and checking your page analytics regularly, for visitor numbers and the length of time they are staying. The best tool to use for that is Google Analytics, it provides you with all the necessary data. From these insights, you can make changes that continue to make your landing page effective and productive. Many of our affiliates are using powerful trackers, such as Voluum, PeerClick, RedTrack, Appsflyer and many others that give them full visibility of their ads’ performance.

We hope that you found this article useful and will start editing your landing pages to get even better results with them! Remember, your ads are only as good as your landing page!