It’s a sad tale we’ve heard time and time again in this industry: “my ad gets hundreds of clicks, but almost no conversions.” After triple-checking for broken links or faulty submission buttons and re-analyzing your target audience, you’re left wondering why your visitors still aren’t converting.
Something must have happened while these visitors were on your landing page. Maybe they each experienced web outages at the exact moment they were submitting your form. Perhaps Chrome, Safari and FireFox web browsers everywhere crashed and prevented anyone from completing the form. (It could happen, right?!)
As convenient as those scenarios would be, unfortunately, the more plausible answer is that – (bear with me here) – you are sabotaging your own landing page.
Don’t worry. It happens to the best of us. And as luck would have it, the self-sabotage is typically pretty easy to identify. If you’re finding yourself in this my-landing-page-isn’t-converting rut, let’s talk about a few of the most common mistakes we’ve seen plenty of businesses make.
#1: Loading Time Lag
Sometimes I can’t believe how often I still see this problem affecting landing pages. Your time, effort and money will be wasted if your visitor leaves before your landing page finishes loading. As the digital space evolves, user expectations on load times becomes much more demanding. According to Google, 53% of users will leave a site if it takes more than three seconds to load. The same research shows that the average site takes 15 seconds to load.
Do not let speed be your landing page killer. A few factors that might be affecting this include:
A slow hosting provider
Poor image optimization
Unclean web code
Too many server requests
Gigantic web files
Speed test your load times regularly and aim for the 2-3 second sweet spot.
#2: A Disconnect From Your Ad Design
When you’re attracting hundreds of clicks with your ad, but converting next to no one on your landing page, the disconnect is sometimes in the design. For example, we’ve seen eye-catching, beautifully designed ads which lead to a landing page with an entirely different look and feel. While both might look great and follow all the best practices of designing for conversions, the graphic disconnect is enough to confuse an already aloof web user.
Let’s take a look at this example below from an old Wealthfront campaign. (source)
Their Facebook ad featured an illustrative element which didn’t carry over into their landing page at all. By merely scanning the two mediums (and let’s keep in mind that users often only scan online!), it doesn’t even appear that they’re a part of the same campaign.
#3: Giving Your Visitor Too Many Options
Chances are your audience is a part of the general, working public who are balancing responsibilities, family time, finances, deadlines…the list goes on. Your landing page should be a simple, stress-free zone, offering clarity and a single purpose.
I’d bet a bottle of wine that we’ve all come across countless landing pages with far too many call-to-actions and options to choose from. For marketers and businesses, this is conversion leakage; for visitors, it’s a potentially confusing experience – one that could dissuade them from continuing on.
Don’t underestimate the value of giving your visitor less choices on a landing page. Take Geico, for instance. There is zero confusion whatsoever on what a visitor should do on this landing page. One choice is an easy conversion.
Another simple example is this Neil Patel creation for Crazy Egg. One call-to-action; one field to complete; one conversion point. Straight to the point and no conflicting noise on the page.
#4: Thinking A Mobile Responsive Design Will Cut It
Chances are many of your ads are running on social ad networks. Most of this audience, if not all, will likely be engaging through their mobile phone. And if there’s one thing about consumer behavior I want all businesses to understand, it’s this: your mobile visitors behave differently from your desktop visitors!
Mobile audiences have much higher distraction levels to compete against; their intent is different. To trust that your landing page’s desktop design will captivate a mobile audience is sabotage with a capital ‘S.’
What’s valid for desktop design will not always be valid for mobile design. Don’t leave the work to your responsive template and hope for the best.
I’m not going to sit here and tell you that your form is too long. That’s really up to each team to decide what customer data you need to gather. So – while shorter is typically better – if you can’t compromise on the number of fields, it’s your job to do everything in your power to make it easier for a visitor to complete your landing page form. Allowing for autocomplete is a great way to make the customer experience painless and quick.
Both Chrome and Safari (provided that the user enables the features) will support the autocomplete feature. And it’s a matter of utilizing the appropriate HTML attributes. For instance, to allow autocomplete for an email field, your HTML code would be “<input type=”email” name=”customerEmail” autocomplete=”email”/>”. (Learn more about form control here).
Additional autocomplete features can be leveraged through the users’ device features like voice, GPS and their Contacts. Put yourself in the shoes of a visitor who only has 30 seconds to spare and investigate different, creative ways you can eliminate form friction.
The best way to identify which parts of your landing page might be turning off your audience is through research. Dive deep into your data to discover their intent and what kind of friction you’re inadvertently causing. Start with one key element and tweak from there.
About the Author
Cheryl Baldwin WSI, Director of Marketing & Communications
Marketing Executive with substantial expertise and knowledge of the digital marketing landscape. Experience in inbound marketing, content marketing, social media, website management, communications, and digital advertising.
When it comes to landing pages, the numbers are skewed. Landing pages do a staggeringly effective job at converting site visitors into paying customers. But directing customers to a standalone landing pages is an underused tactic. As a general rule, when the numbers don’t add up, it means there’s an opportunity for businesses. Even though landing pages are slowly becoming the standard, implementing them now will still give you a significant edge over at least a few of your competitors. Leveling up your landing pages can improve your conversion rate, which impacts your bottom line. And the best part? You can do it without increasing the number of visitors to your site. To give businesses an idea of how much of a difference landing pages can make, we found some stats highlighting Why You Need To Level Up Your Landing Pages. Since you’re looking for information on landing pages, you’ve probably heard using a homepage as a landing page is a bad idea. Unfortunately, most businesses take this to mean they can create one landing page – a home landing page – as a catchall for every campaign they’re running. In fact, 52% of marketers (for shame!) don’t even create a new landing page for different marketing campaigns. In the same way it’s suboptimal to send every single site visitor to your homepage, it’s a mistake to send email subscribers, social media follows and PPC traffic to the same landing page. Each of these channels has unique methods for getting visitors to click through, and different promises and goals once they do – so why would you send them to the same generic page? Start embracing the power of landing pages by creating specific pages for each of your various traffic streams. It won’t be long before you experience more success and higher conversion rates! The maxim “less is more” applies to many things – landing pages included. However, the fact that 48% of landing pages contain multiples offers suggests the majority of businesses haven’t yet made the connection. The temptation to cram more than one offer onto the page you know visitors land is strong – but don’t do it. Customers don’t want to be confused or oversold and offering something other than exactly what they’re expecting actually does both. Craft strong, confident offers and trust your landing pages to do their work! Oh and don’t forget to include a call to action as asingle call-to-action button can increase conversions by 62%. If you have a couple of landing pages and aren’t getting the results you want, don’t give up quite yet. As we’ve discussed, the more you connect the messaging of your landing page to the arriving audience (and the channel they used) the better results you’ll get. If this means creating more landing pages – even different ones for segments of the same audience group – then do it (the stats have your back). If all else fails, try adding some short explainer videos to your landing pages. Using videos on landing pages can increase conversions by 86% – anything capable of producing results that good is worth a shot! One of the biggest factors that stunts the success of marketing campaigns is not testing vital components like landing pages! The fact is landing pages are where the magic has to happen, so absolutely need to be sure that every aspect of the page is contributing to conversion! You’ve spent the money and dedicated time to funnelling visitors to a certain page with an exact message – but then you don’t test to make sure the headline or call-to-action button isn’t confusing customers? 61% of customer do less than five tests per month on their landing pages; excuse me for saying it again but – this is an opportunity! Test your landing pages components, tweak based on your findings and enjoy the increased conversions with just a little bit of extra work. Last but not least, we come to a pretty straightforward fix for an all-too-common landing page mistake: too many form fields. Yes, we live in the Information Age, which means every little detail you can pull from your potential customers can be used to your advantage. But you know what? One or two pieces of information are a lot better than zero, which is what you’ll get if you present customers with a 15-field form! The proof is in the pudding: a company found that reducing the number of form fields to 10 or under increases conversions by 120%. I’ll go a step further and suggest you keep the number of form fields to less than 5 as I’m a firm believer in keeping things as simple as possible. ———————————————- Thank you for reading about the power of the Landing Page. If you have any questions, or would like to give Landing Pages a try for one specific product or service, we would love to help you. Here’s the full infographic, for your sharing pleasure:
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