As a professional in the online marketing niche, running campaigns at various levels both locally and internationally, I have to constantly be on the lookout; searching, adding, removing, editing new and existing keywords, ads and pages (including landing pages).
As a professional SEM expert, my job is not restricted to purely managing Adwords/Bing campaigns, but much more. When working with different organizations, I have to constantly “re-invent” myself and offer new edge-gaining platforms, ideas and technologies.
One of the most dynamic fields, where as a marketing specialist I have a large range of freedom and optimization/customization possibilities is landing pages.
This article posted in 2014 on CrazyEgg’s blog provides some nice insights about which platform you should chose.
Over the years I’ve tested several platforms, layouts and with the gracious help of graphic designers, hundreds of designs. It’s a constant struggle between innovation, user friendliness, tracking and… results! At the end of the day, conversions are the most important as we are not measured simply by the volume of traffic, nice design or clicks on a specific button.
Like most professionals already know, a successful landing page should not contain “too much”. You should present your idea in a way that the visitor captures it in a matter of seconds, otherwise he’s gone.
After weeks and thousands of visits and a whole lot of AB testing, several conclusions were reached. Along with an analyst we found which was the highest performing CTA button color, dynamic text, best positions, amount of text, layout, etc…
We often faced an issue where our landing page design limited us and the message didn’t go through properly enough, hence the conversion rate and actual conversions were not optimal.
As a result of this we decided on implementing a Youtube video for the Brand landing pages. My initial thought of sending Brand traffic to a landing page instead of the homepage was that it would bea total failure.
Much to my surprise, these landing pages out-performed the homepage! This was by 1 or 2 points ; The LPs had a conversion rate of about 54% on brand campaigns whereas the traditional campaigns leading to the homepage had around 46% CR!
Using tools such as CrazyEgg and Luckyorange, we were able to see that the users actually took time to watch the video (not entirely, but still).
If visitors of a brand campaign took the time to watch about 20 seconds of a video, it meant that they were most probably thirsty for more information.
Creating a video isn’t a simple task to be done by everybody. Many organizations do not keep video specialists in-house, hence I had to get creative; I decided to embed online presentations in a landing page.
The users will recognize the functionality quite easily as it resembles videos and here they can control the speed and display of the presentation. As a marketer I finally get to control the entire visual information offered to the visitor.
It took me a while to hunt for the best presentation platform for my needs based upon template designs capabilities, ease of use, speed of service, external sharing options focusing on embedding the online presentations on landing pages etc…
At the end of the day, I chose to work with emaze for three reasons. Their huge choice of gorgeous templates enables a person with minimal design capabilities to do great things. Furthermore it is so easy to use and embed all types of media, Gifs and pretty much anything from the web. Finally, it is incredibly easy to embed it on my landing pages as well as share it on social media.
I realized that the idea of implementing presentations in PPC landing pages proved to also be a good decision financially as the majority of product/services cost over $10, a huge price barrier. Furthermore, the conversion rate on landing pages featuring presentations increased on average by 2.25% in comparison to the landing pages with thevideos. I also found that these landing page types tend to work better on Adwords campaigns than Facebook or Adcenter.
Lastly, I highly recommend AB testing as it is part of the optimization process. While this can be an endless task, experience has taught me to first start with testing the presentation. Because it is relatively easy to create presentations with various changes, you can AB test various slides to see what works best with your audience.
Have your own great landing page tips? Feel free to share them with us on twitter at @emaze_tweets or Facebook!
