Landing Page Lessons From Top PPC Advertisers

You can learn a lot by studying campaigns from top advertisers across different industries.

Sometimes they don’t know what they’re doing, but more often than not, large PPC advertisers have the team and budget it takes to optimize their landing page conversion rates to get better results.

A/B testing landing pages can be extremely expensive and time-consuming. Your team has to study your customers, come up with a hypothesis, design a new variation, code the new versions, test, measure the results, implement a winner, and then rinse and repeat the process all over again.

People talk a lot about A/B testing and how important it is, but sometimes it’s easier said than done.

The good news is that studying top advertisers can help with this process. You still need to test to make sure you get better results, but studying landing pages from leaders in different industries can shortcut your A/B testing and design process.

Need some proof? Look no further than the examples listed below.

#1: Offer a Google-Specific Discount

In this first example, FromYouFlowers.com offers a Google specific discount to visitors.

This accomplishes two things. First, it makes visitors feel special since they’re receiving something based on the ad they just clicked, and second, it provides a discount to motivate visitors to make a purchase and not visit other sites to compare prices.

A 20 percent discount might be too steep for some businesses or industries, but finding a way to offer a discount and welcome Google traffic to boost conversion rates can go a long way toward increasing the ROI for your campaign.

#2: Use a Simple Landing Page Template

Salesforce uses a very simple landing page template to convert its AdWords traffic, as evidenced by the page shown below.

The design might seem too simple and like it has too little information, but by using a simple template, it’s easy for Salesforce to deploy new landings pages for different campaigns since it simply needs to swap out the headline, copy, and image. This means it can deploy a large number of pages that are customized for different campaigns and ad groups without needing to go back to the drawing board over and over again to design and code an entirely new design.

Here’s another example of the same simple landing page design updated for a different campaign.

#3: Break Up Your Forms Into Multiple Steps

The next lesson comes from Phoenix.edu.

Regardless of what you think of their business practices, Phoenix.edu is very adept when it comes to PPC ad campaigns. They spend a lot of money (estimated to be between $6 million and $8 million per month) and have likely spent thousands of dollars to optimize their account.

One lesson that can be gleaned is to break up your forms into multiple steps. They have a lengthy sign-up process, but instead of intimidating visitors with one super-long form, they break it up into multiple steps.

If you use a long form on your site to get people to register for your product or service, you might want to consider breaking it up into multiple steps. Progressive (as seen below) is another large PPC advertiser that uses a multi-step form to get visitors to commit to filling out the form without feeling intimidated with how much time it’s going to take to fill out.

Takeaways

These are just a few of the lessons you can learn from advertisers spending thousands and even millions of dollars per month on PPC. By studying more campaigns of leading PPC advertisers, you can identify what works and what doesn’t and also come up with an endless stream of new A/B testing ideas for your own campaigns.

Did you learn anything about landing page best practices from this post? Leave a comment to let us know your thoughts.

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