Tips For Getting The Most Out of Your PPC Landing Pages

Increasing campaign profits. It’s what every affiliate is looking to achieve. So what separates the ones who make it and the ones who don’t? One place you can look to for evidence are their landing pages. Top-earning affiliates plain and simply have the best landing pages around, and the following are a few techniques that “supers” use to make the most of these indispensable sales tools.

Consistency: Setting Yourself Up For Conversion Success

The key here is to be consistent. You want to lead the consumer along a trail where their eyes see what they need to see in order to take the next step. When you’re not consistent with your keywords and messaging, you’ll lose the prospect quickly. Take Registry Cleaners as an example. An inexperienced affiliate may advertise a product, for example ParetoLogic’s RegCure, on the term “Registry Cleaners” with the following ad text:

Easy Registry Cleaners
Clean your registry 100%
Increase Your PC’s Speed
www.cheapPCcleaners.com

While the ad itself isn’t too bad, when the prospect clicks on it they’re then taken to a page with the headline “Inexpensive Software For Increasing PC Speed“, and a list of names of different registry cleaner products. The consumer’s specific search query for “Registry Cleaner” hasn’t been re-enforced on the landing page, and they’re required to take additional steps to find the product they want to buy.

A much better way to design this page would be to make it product specific page, in this case Paretologic RegCure, with the words “ParetoLogic RegCure” clearly written in large type at the top of the page in a bold header, with testimonials and awards, all immediately in plain view and directly supporting the ad from which the visitor arrived. This shows the consumer they’ve landed in the right place, and tells them that they’ve found the product they’re looking for.

Usability: Streamlining Your Visitor’s Experience

Usability is something a lot of affiliates tend to forget about. The fact is that if you do it right, you can boost your conversions for both your paid and organic traffic. The key to strong site usability is making sure there aren’t any obstacles to consumers purchasing your product once they’ve reached the landing page. Obstacles include a lack of a clear call-to-action, missing trust elements, unclear messaging, and so on.

A visitor who has just arrived at your site makes instant value judgements about all aspects of your business. At this stage in the buying process their behavior is volatile, making them likely to bolt at the slightest inconsistency or point of confusion. Ask the following questions to help prevent scaring your visitors off or losing their attention.

*Is there a clear headline stating your landing page’s main purpose?

*Is the product title and image above the fold, prominently placed and immediately visible?

*Is the buy button and price prominent and visible immediately?

*Are there complicated options, buttons or links that could confuse or distract your visitor?

*Will your visitor know immediately how to use your site and what they need to do to achieve their goal?

Pursuit of Perfection: Testing Your Landing Pages

Start with the most basic kind: A/B testing. Split your visitors into two equal and random groups, showing one group version A of your LP design and another group version B. If A performs better use it as your primary LP, and if B performs better use that one. This is the easiest way to see what elements on your page are working and which aren’t.

Remember to only test one element at a time, such as the header, body copy, button size and button color, etc. That way if you see a difference in conversion rates on each page, you know which element of design it is that’s making the difference. Small differences are very significant. A spike in conversion rate from 1.5% to 1.65% increases your sales by 1/10th with no extra advertising expenditure.

Multivariate testing works on the same principle, only you split the traffic into more groups with more variations of the original landing page. This type of testing is generally used for larger sites with high-volume traffic.

Make sure you test long enough to see statistically valid results or what experts call Level of Statistical Confidence. For more on the subject of valid stats check out this Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_significance. Be patient. It can take up to a month to meet your standard for statistical confidence.