Online advertising can be a costly business. Although a successful campaign can bring incredible rewards, the opposite is also true. In a busy sector, if you get your strategy wrong, you can burn through a budget with terrifying speed, often with little to show for it.
Your landing pages can make or break a campaign’s profitability. High-quality pages with excellent conversion rates will make the most of your advertising investment, but making any of these six frighteningly common mistakes will doom your campaign to unprofitable failure.
1) Mobile Fail
Mobile visitors now account for just over 50% of total online traffic. If your landing page doesn’t provide a smooth mobile experience, you’re carelessly throwing away half of your ad spend.
Make sure your landing pages offer a clear layout which seamlessly adapts to different screen sizes. If the page features a form, make sure it’s as simple as possible and easy to fill in on an average smartphone. Above all, test your landing pages on as many devices as you can lay your hands on, and fix any issues before spending a cent on advertising.
2) Long Forms
But it’s not just mobile visitors who need user-friendly forms. Each additional field you present will dial your conversion rate down by a notch, especially if you insist it needs to be filled in. Gathering additional information is great for business intelligence, but don’t let it come at the expense of conversions.
3) Confusing Calls to Action
When a visitor lands on your page, you should leave them in no doubt about what to do next. Present a clear call to action that leads them by the hand to your intended destination. Giving multiple CTAs or surrounding them with other links confuses the issue, driving conversion rates inexorably downward.
4) Distracting Design
And on a similar note, if your landing page is confusing, poorly laid out, or just plain ugly, your visitors will be distracted from the conversion action you want them to take. A little design effort goes a long way in keeping a visitor-focused. Use clear typefaces, attractive images, and above all, keep it simple and compelling.
5) Bloat and Slowness
As part of keeping things simple, don’t overload a landing page with social media buttons, sliders, eye candy, and any of the other extras that modern tech makes so easy. Pointless bloat is a bad idea anywhere on a website, but it’s disastrous on a landing page.
Don’t introduce elements that slow things down, don’t give the visitor too much to take in, and never lose focus on the whole purpose of a landing page: converting each click into a customer.
6) Poor Copywriting
And lastly, you’ve paid for each visitor that hits your landing page. Your copy needs to justify the expense of every click you’ve bought. Poorly written, careless, or unconvincing copy that doesn’t deliver on the promise of the advertisement is a waste of everyone’s time. Whether your content runs to 100 or 1,000 words, employ an expert to make sure it hits the mark.
Great landing pages often seem deceptively simple, but they’re at the heart of a successful online advertising campaign. Creating a landing page which resonates takes talent and creativity, but avoiding these common mistakes will provide a strong foundation for your campaign to build on.
