A successful digital marketing campaign involves a lot of moving parts, each critical. Budgeting, targeting, creatives — and design, of course. It isn’t just social tiles, infographics, and video, either. One area that often gets overlooked? Landing page design.
With all the work that goes into devising an effective digital marketing campaign, it’s easy for landing pages to fall between the cracks. Many brands will try to save time by directing users to product pages.
While this can work, to maximise digital return on investment it’s crucial that users are directed to dedicated landing pages by campaigns. Today, our digital design agency in Melbourne will explain why landing page design is so crucial.
The purpose of landing pages
What landing pages offer is a purpose-built webpage that facilitates and drives specific actions. In the context of a digital advertising campaign, that means a standalone dedicated page that digital ads direct users towards. The ad itself is what gets users through the door; the landing page is where brands make their sales pitch. It’s where sales are made, forms are submitted, and appointments booked.
The landing page is the end point for users who click on ads, responsible for converting visitors and users into customers or leads. This makes landing page design crucial for digital ad campaigns, directly impacting campaign outcomes.
Many businesses simply re-use existing webpages as landing pages for their digital campaigns. The problem with that a website can have multiple pages with different purposes, whether that’s driving conversions, providing information, or describing different offerings.
By contrast, a landing page is a single webpage designed around a specific goal, usually to encourage a specific action such as:
- Making a purchase
- Signing up
- Completing a lead form
Whatever the goal, a dedicated page should be built around it. This allows for much more focused messaging and conversion-focused design to be used. And that in turn results in reduced bounce rates, improved user experience, and increased conversions.
Digital ads landing page best practices: what do the best landing page designs have in common, and how do you create a landing page that converts?
Branding is key
Just as with any other webpage, effective branding is critical for:
- Maintaining brand identity and cohesion
- Building recognition and awareness
- Creating a shared visual identity between landing pages and ads
Consistency in design is especially important in digital marketing strategies. Digital campaigns run across multiple formats, such as banner ads, EDMs, search ads, and more. They also frequently use retargeting to reconnect users across multiple exposures.
In both cases, branding is critical for generating recognition and recall across formats and exposures. Even if a conversion isn’t made initially and users bounce off, a well-designed landing page with strong branding increases the likelihood of them remembering the offer and converting when they encounter the campaign again in the future.
Landing page content need to be consistent with ad content
All ads and landing pages submitted to Google Ads will be assigned a Quality Score, with higher scores more likely to be served to users. And one of the main criteria Google considers when scoring ads is consistency between ads and landing pages.
Simply put, Google’s goal is to deliver ads which are relevant to users and their intent. It wants to avoid users clicking on ads for one product or service, only to be taken to a landing page selling something else altogether. Ensuring designs and content are in lock-step with the ads themselves is a key consideration when designing landing pages.
Some examples of what that can mean in practical terms include:
- Mirroring ad copy on landing pages
- Shared titles and headings
- Using keywords in landing page copy
While other digital platforms may not assign a Quality Score the same way Google does, consistency still matters, improving the user experience and conversion rates.
Create unique landing pages for each products, service, or offer
Advertising that’s tailored to the customer is increasingly becoming an expectation. According to a 2021 article by McKinsey, personalised advertising:
- Is expected by 71% of consumers
- Can potentially lift revenue by 10-15%
- Is a key factor in purchase decisions for 78% of respondents
In the context of landing pages, that means creating pages that tailored to customers. The amount of customisation depends on the campaign – ads that are part of the same campaign might only need minor adjustments, whereas separate campaigns may need different templates.
While it might not be possible to create a custom landing page design for each individual user, it’s still important that landing pages and the language and imagery used in them reflects specific offers, products, or services.
When setting up campaign targeting and segmentation, it’s important to identifying which audiences are distinct enough to require different messaging. The next step is creating new headings, CTAs, copy, and supporting material that resonates with those distinct target audiences. The result is greater cut-through and advertising ROI.
Get to the point
Regular webpages often need to be longer than landing pages. They need to contain product or service information, FAQs, information about pricing schemes, and more.
Landing pages have on the other hand have one goal: to encourage conversions.
In practice, that means designing landing pages to emphasise the intended action and encouraging users to convert via effective copy and imagery, design cues, and formatting. Short and sweet is the way to go with landing pages in most cases.
Some general rules can include:
- Including forms and shopping buttons in the page banner
- Placing multiple call-to-action (CTA) buttons throughout the page
- Highlighting specific deals or offers in header text
- Keeping copy short and conversions-focused
- Eliminating unnecessary information and content
Of course, this is general advice, and it doesn’t apply for all cases. Purchasers of high-involvement goods and services often perform extensive research, making longer landing pages more effective for converting.
Get rid of distractions
The best landing pages have a single goal in mind, with graphic design that funnels users towards that goal and which remove anything that might divert users away from that goal.
For example, look no further than homepage buttons. On the rest of the website, these buttons are crucial for navigation. On a landing page? They’re a distraction which could divert users away from your key goals. Instead of staying on the landing page, they might instead get distracted looking at other pages on the website instead of making purchases, booking appointments, or signing up.
In practical terms, what does this mean?
- Hiding navigation menus and homepage buttons from landing pages
- Removing all links from the landing page
- Getting rid of irrelevant CTA buttons
- Using lightboxes or popups for forms
High-converting landing pages typically do away with most of these features, resulting in a streamlined page focused on lead generation and meeting brand or business goals.
In the market for a Landing page design service? Contact our digital design company today
Creating effective, compelling landing pages should be a top priority when planning for a digital advertising campaign. It’s as much an art as a science, and requires a design team that understands how to use web design to not only inform, but also convert.
MOO Marketing & Design has extensive experience in website and landing page design. We are a full-service marketing agency in Melbourne – in addition to web design, we’ve supported some of Australia’s best-known brands with PPC campaigns, email marketing, social media, and more.
Contact our team today to see what we can do for you. Call (03) 8843 1600 or 0466 066 691, or complete our contact form to see how our digital marketing agency services can support your brand with its goals.