Your landing page is the first page that a visitor sees on your website after clicking an online ad, link in a promotional email, or result in a search engine. The main aim of a landing page is to encourage users to take a predetermined action which would help you to attain your goal. The action could be either buying a product, getting personal information, or anything else. A good landing page design can improve your conversion rate by converting Adwords clicks into customers, whereas a bad landing page can cause your entire campaign to fail.
The success and/or failure of an online campaign depends completely on the success and/or failure of your landing page. In this article I am going to discuss a few tips that can help you in improving your landing page design.
Relevancy
Your landing page should be relevant to the ad copy on which your visitor has clicked to reach your landing page. The traffic you get from an Adwords campaign is very targeted and is your visitors are looking for specific things. Include the same keywords that you used in your ad-copy in the title and content of your landing pages so that your visitor knows that he is at the right place.
Above the Fold
Keep all of your important elements of your landing page (i.e., your call to action link) above the fold. “Above the Fold” is the portion of your landing page that your visitor can see without scrolling. If you are trying to sell a product, then put the image of your product above the fold, or if you are generating some leads then put the lead generation form above the fold. Putting important things above the fold always helps in increasing your conversion rate.
Reduce Distractions
Your landing page should able to create an environment where your visitors can make decisions easily without any confusion. Removing navigational links to other pages of your website and less important content will reduce the confusion in your visitor’s mind. By removing navigation links, you can control the content that you want your visitors to see but it depends on the product you are going to sell. If you are selling a complex product then you may need to provide links to other useful information on your website.
Proper Use of White Spaces
Nobody reads the entire text on your landing page. Visitors scan the text and use only important information to make a decision. Don’t fill your landing pages with tons of not so important information. Users will spend only a few seconds on your landing page and will go away if they can’t find the information they are searching for. Put all the important points in the form of points (bullets) so that they could be scanned easily by the user. Paragraphs should be short and only contain up to 3-4 lines.
Coherency
It takes a matter of seconds for a visitor to decide whether your page is has what he is looking for or not. Incoherent pages won’t convert well and reduce confidence among your customers about your product. When you test a landing page you should know that it’s not testing the elements alone but it’s testing about how the elements work together. Hence, while designing your landing page, don’t ignore the strong potential impact of coherency.
Gagandeep Singh is working as an internet marketing expert for a Landing Page Optimization Company and a freelance writer. He mainly writes on landing page design, PPC, SEO, Web 2.0 and Technology.